History > 2015 > USA > Politics > White House / President (I)

President Obama arriving in Montgomery, Ala.,

for a tribute to Bloody Sunday to be held in Selma, Ala.

Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times

Selma Gathering Reflects on a Bloody Day in Civil Rights Fight

By PETER BAKER and RICHARD FAUSSET        NYT        MARCH 7, 2015

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/08/us/obama-in-selma-for-edmund-pettus-bridge-attack-anniversary.html

President Obama

with Representative John Lewis in Selma, Ala.

Mr. Lewis was injured in the march there 50 years ago.

Doug Mills/The New York Times

Obama, at Selma Memorial, Says, ‘We Know the March Is Not Yet Over’

By PETER BAKER and RICHARD FAUSSET

NYT

MARCH 7, 2015

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/08/us/obama-in-selma-for-edmund-pettus-bridge-attack-anniversary.html

Obama Delivers

Tough-Love Message

to End Kenya Trip

JULY 26, 2015

The New York Times

By PETER BAKER

NAIROBI, Kenya — At one point during his weekend in Kenya, President Obama acknowledged the delicate nature of deciding which of his vast array of half cousins and stepaunts should be invited to dinner.

“The people of Kenya,” he said wryly, “will be familiar with the need to manage family politics sometimes.”

Over the course of two days here, Mr. Obama tried to manage the broader family politics of his father’s land, a country that considers him one of its own, even as it has played a singular role in his own life and career. Bathed in adulation, he nonetheless delivered a tough-love message before leaving on Sunday, challenging Kenya to tackle corruption, sexism and division.

For the first African-American president returning to his ancestral home, a moment unlike any before in the history of either country, the visit was powerful and yet, at times, strangely impersonal. At some moments, Mr. Obama seemed genuinely moved by the experience, and he reflected on the country’s impact on him. At other times, he talked dispassionately about policy issues, sounding much like he does in plenty of other countries.

He made it clear that he resented the security bubble that prevented him from visiting his father’s village or even just strolling down the streets of the capital, Nairobi, as he did as a young man. Kenyans clearly craved his attention, desperate in many cases to see him, talk with him or touch him, but they were largely kept at a distance. In the end, he has experienced more frenzied receptions in other countries, such as Ghana, his first stop in Africa as president in 2009, when his motorcade was swarmed by thousands of people.

Mr. Obama, who arrived Friday evening, saw the first large-scale crowds of this trip on Sunday morning when his helicopter touched down at Kenyatta University. Thousands of students and others lined the streets, waving, cheering, taking photographs and in some cases wearing T-shirts with messages welcoming him.

When his motorcade left the campus to head down a highway past ramshackle communities far from the polished buildings of downtown, he passed thousands more waiting along the road, in their case mostly silent, as if holding vigil.

At Safaricom Indoor Arena, where he delivered a speech to 4,500 people, the crowd chanted, “Obama! Obama! Obama!” and the public address system played a song with the refrain, “I’m coming home.”

When he went to shake hands after the speech, the only time he did that with everyday Kenyans, the crowd surged forward, pushing barriers several feet closer to him.

“Don’t push, don’t push,” Mr. Obama implored, before making a quick exit after just a few minutes on the rope line.

He had more of a sustained conversation later in the day with a group of 75 selected representatives of nongovernmental organizations. But it was a heavily scripted event, in which predetermined Kenyans were given the floor and each delivered a speech on his or her area of interest. Mr. Obama’s responses were sober and typically professorial.

“Part of the challenge that I’ve had during the course of my presidency is that given the demands of the job and the bubble, I can’t come here and just go upcountry and visit for a week and meet everybody,” he lamented earlier in the trip. “I’m more restricted, ironically, as president of the United States than I will be as a private citizen.”

In a country fighting the Shabab, a Qaeda affiliate that has carried out repeated deadly attacks on Kenyan soil, security was a serious concern, enough so that Joseph P. Clancy, the director of the Secret Service, personally accompanied Mr. Obama and Kenyan authorities shut down vital roads. Seemingly much of Nairobi stayed away for the first day.

Mr. Obama hoped to connect with Kenyans at the arena, where he was introduced by his half sister, Auma Obama, who runs a foundation here and hosted him for his first visit to the country nearly three decades ago. Noting a common Kenyan saying — “don’t get lost” — she said that he is not lost now, “nor was he lost when he first came to Kenya. I’ll tell you that because he was with me. He fit right in.”

“He’s not just our familia,” she added. “He gets us. He gets us.”

Mr. Obama tried to show that with a few words of Swahili.

“Habari Zenu!” he called out to the crowd, meaning, “How are you?”

He recalled that first trip as a young man and how he arrived at the airport, where an airline official helping him fill out a form recognized his last name and asked if he was related to his father.

“That was the first time that my name meant something,” he said.

Recounting stories he also told in his memoir, Mr. Obama noted that during that visit, Auma’s car broke down repeatedly.

“We’d be on the highway, we’d have to call the juakali — he’d bring us tools,” he said, referring to a serviceman. “We’d be sitting there, waiting. And I slept on a cot in her apartment. Instead of eating at fancy banquets with the president, we were drinking tea and eating ugali and sukumawiki,” or maize flour and greens.

In making his personal connection, Mr. Obama then used it to gently push for progress. He noted that his grandfather had served as a cook for the British Army when Kenya was a colony, and that his father had gone to America to seek an education.

“In many ways, their lives offered snapshots of Kenya’s history, but they also told us something about future,” he said. “They show the enormous barriers to progress that so many Kenyans faced just one or two generations ago.”

To continue that progress, he said, Kenya needs to confront “the dark corners” of its past and wage a sustained campaign against corruption, expand its democracy, overcome ethnic division, protect human rights and work to end discrimination against women and girls.

“Kenya is at a crossroads,” he said, “a moment filled with peril but also enormous promise.”

Even as he held forth, he delicately navigated the sensitivities of his Kenyan hosts. He made the point that for democracy to thrive, “there also has to be space for citizens to exercise their rights,” without suggesting that Kenya had been closing that space or naming the human rights groups that have been targeted. He did not note that the arena where he spoke is part of a sports complex used just last year to round up Somalis for summary arrest and deportation.

Instead, he acknowledged the United States’ own struggles, citing the recent shootings of nine black churchgoers in Charleston, S.C., and the dispute over flying the Confederate battle flag.

“What makes America exceptional is not the fact that we’re perfect,” he said. “It’s the fact that we struggle to improve. We’re self-critical.”

Mr. Obama said Kenya’s future lay with itself. Repeating a message he espoused during his first presidential trip to Africa in 2009, he emphasized that “the future of Africa is up to Africans,” and that they should not look “to the outside for salvation.” But he vowed that the United States would help.

“I’m here as a friend who wants Kenya to succeed,” he said.

By Sunday afternoon, as Mr. Obama arrived at the airport to head to his next stop in Ethiopia, hundreds of people gathered to see him off, including several groups of dancers in colorful outfits, ululating and banging drums. As he headed from his helicopter to Air Force One, Mr. Obama paused as if tempted to go over and greet them, as he does with crowds at almost any airport in the United States and many overseas.

But evidently he thought better of it. He waved and smiled at them instead and headed up the stairs of his plane to depart for the last time as president.
 

A version of this article appears in print on July 27, 2015, on page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: Obama Delivers Tough-Love Message to End Kenya Trip.

Obama Delivers Tough-Love Message to End Kenya Trip,
NYT, JULY 26, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/27/world/africa/
obama-calls-on-kenya-to-confront-its-problems.html

Calling Obama ‘Our Son,’

Kenyans Nod Knowingly

at His Critique

 

JULY 26, 2015

The New York Times

By MARC SANTORA

NAIROBI, Kenya — Shaking off the morning chill, they walked down dirt pathways and past burning piles of trash. It would cost 10 shillings — about a dime — to see the speech, but they wanted to see the man.

Inside a shack made of pressed tin sheets, the roof held up by tree trunks, they gathered early Sunday morning to hear President Barack Hussein Obama on television.

During Mr. Obama’s whirlwind visit to his father’s homeland, people around Kenya often referred to him as “our son.” But what they heard Sunday was more like a lecture from a stern but loving father.

And they could not have been happier. Even if they were at times skeptical on a point in Mr. Obama’s speech, they said his message would be absorbed and, they hoped, bring change.

“He is saying what we need to hear,” Simon Oudo said as he watched.

When Mr. Obama criticized the “cancer of corruption” that infects every corner of life, Mr. Oudo, 25, nodded knowingly.

“I have no job,” he said. He scrapes by on the 50 shillings he earns for each car he washes. In a good week, he can take home 1,000 shillings, or $10.

“There are many jobs,” Mr. Oudo said. “But many people buy those jobs. It is corruption. It is killing us.”

Mr. Obama’s speech was directed to Kenyans, but it was likely to resonate in any city or village on the continent, many facing the same struggles and challenges.

In Kibera, a rough and worn slum in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, it was the sense of personal connection with Mr. Obama that made this moment different.

When the president spoke of his grandfather’s struggles working as a cook in the British military, there was a hushed silence in the shack. Most of the men there wore battered shoes, and their hands were worn from labor. They knew about struggle.

“He was referred to as a boy even though he was a grown man,” Mr. Obama said of his grandfather, adding, “A young, ambitious Kenyan today should not have to do what my grandfather did, and serve a foreign master.”

They cheered.

“You don’t need to do what my father did, and leave your home in order to get a good education and access to opportunity,” Mr. Obama said. “Because of Kenya’s progress, because of your potential, you can build your future right here, right now.”

They burst out in enthusiastic shouting.

Kibera is only a short walk from new office buildings and fancy restaurants, a testament to Kenya’s growing prosperity.

When Mr. Obama came to Kenya in 2006 as a senator, he visited this area.

Mohamed Abdul Rahim Suleiman met him that day, and on Sunday, he wore two Obama buttons on his chest as proof.

The words on one button — “Change. Courage. Hope.” — were also the words echoed in the shack, grandly known as San Siro Stadium. It is usually filled with people watching soccer. A chicken scurried across the floor as the headline on the TV declared, “Obama’s Grand Return.”

To a person, the people watching the speech said they believed Mr. Obama’s return would help their country.

“We all trust Obama,” said Solomon Mujivane, 49. “We are very proud of him. We know he does not see tribe. When he speaks about corruption, our leaders will listen.”

But even among this adoring crowd, there was some cynicism. At one point, a group of men burst into laughter, shouting in Swahili, as Mr. Obama talked about corruption.

“Corruption is everywhere,” Rashid Seif, 32, explained, pointing at another young man. “Just ask that man.”

Apparently, he was taking a bit off the top of the entry fee for watching the speech.

Mr. Obama’s call for better treatment of women — unlike descriptions of his personal history and calls to end corruption — was met mostly with silence. He got a laugh when he compared a society that limits its women to a team that does not use half its players.

“That’s stupid,” Mr. Obama said.

But there was only one woman in the room.

Elizabeth Nakhungo, 36, sat quietly with a broad smile. When asked what she thought about the president’s speech, her husband answered for her.

“She loved it,” he said.

The crowd was largely quiet as it listened to what at times felt like a sermon. One young man leaned over to a friend as Mr. Obama discussed his own journey and whispered, “Obama is really telling the whole story of all Kenyans.”

Mr. Oudo, the car washer, does not know what tomorrow will bring. He expects, though, that it will be a struggle to pay for food. Life will be hard.

“But today, it is a beautiful day,” he said. “We thank this great man for coming to Kenya.”

A version of this article appears in print on July 27, 2015, on page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Kenyans Nod Knowingly at a President’s Critique.

Calling Obama ‘Our Son,’ Kenyans Nod Knowingly at His Critique,
NYT, JULY 26, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/27/world/africa/
calling-obama-our-son-kenyans-nod-knowingly-at-his-critique.html

Obama in Kenya:

An Upbeat Tone,

but Notes of Discord, Too

JULY 25, 2015

The New York Times

By PETER BAKER

and MARC SANTORA

NAIROBI, Kenya — The return of the long-lost son, as President Obama is widely seen by Kenyans, had all the elements of a family reunion. They hugged, they caught up, they talked about shared interests, they agreed they should get together more often, and they had their sibling spats.

In his first visit as president to his father’s home country, Mr. Obama struck a relentlessly upbeat tone, declaring, “Africa is on the move”; praising progress toward democracy and economic growth; and marveling over the changes he saw on the streets of this locked-down capital.

But he found himself at odds with his hosts on human rights and same-sex marriage and gingerly tried to nudge them to change their ways. At a news conference, he said the fight against terrorism in Kenya should not be used to justify a crackdown on dissent and argued that no nation should discriminate against gays and lesbians, comparing it to the era of segregation of African-Americans.

“If somebody is a law-abiding citizen who is going about their business and working in a job and obeying the traffic signs and doing all the other things good citizens are supposed to do and not harming anybody, the idea that they are going to be treated differently or abused because of who they love is wrong,” Mr. Obama said. “Full stop.”

Standing to his left on the lush lawn of the colonial-era State House, President Uhuru Kenyatta accepted the advice on human rights without argument, saying Kenya was trying to improve its handling of security and liberty. “This issue of terrorism is new to us,” he said, “and as it is new, we learn with each and every step.”

But in a country where homosexuality is widely condemned, he flatly rejected Mr. Obama’s views on gay rights. “There are some things we must admit we don’t share; our culture, our society don’t accept,” he said. “It is very difficult for us to be able to impose on people that which they themselves do not accept.”

The disagreement was quickly papered over, though, as both Mr. Obama and Kenyans focused on the historic nature of his visit. While Mr. Obama came here three times before taking office, many Kenyans had bristled that he waited until the seventh year of his presidency to return.

He joked in public events that he had not wanted to make the rest of Africa jealous by coming too soon, but expressed a strong connection to Kenya. “I’m proud to be the first U.S. president to visit Kenya, and obviously, this is personal for me,” he said at a business forum. “There’s a reason why my name is Barack Hussein Obama. My father came from these parts and I have family and relatives here. And in my visits over the years, walking the streets of Nairobi, I’ve come to know the warmth and the spirit of the Kenyan people.”

He held out Kenya as a model in a fast-growing region. “Kenya is leading the way,” Mr. Obama said. “When I was here in Nairobi 10 years ago, it looked very different than it does today.”

He added, however, that the greatest threat to continued growth in Kenya is the scourge of corruption, found here from the local police officer to the highest politicians. Mr. Obama and Mr. Kenyatta released a 29-point plan for fighting corruption in Kenya. They also signed an “action plan” to bolster Kenya’s security in its fight against the Shabab, the Qaeda affiliate based in Somalia.

Mr. Obama could not get out of his armored car to wander the streets as in the past. Instead, his most intimate encounter with Kenya beyond its official leadership came during a dinner Friday at his hotel with three dozen members of his extended family.

Over a buffet of Kenyan food, including chicken, fish and beef, the president heard his relatives talk about life in Kenya, and he told them a little about life in the White House. Some of them told Mr. Obama they wished he could spend more time in Kenya, and with them. He later said he spent part of the meal “begging for forgiveness” that his schedule did not allow it. “Once I’m a private citizen, I will have more freedom to reconnect,” he said.

Said Obama, his uncle, said his relatives understood. “He explained to the family members the nature of his work,” Said Obama said in an interview. “But he said his mind is always with them, his heart is always here.”

The president generally has only remote connections to most relatives living here. He is closest to his half sister, Auma Obama, who hosted him for his first visit as a young man. Also present on Friday night was his step-grandmother, known as Mama Sarah but whom he calls Granny.

His Kenyan relatives have not been regular visitors to the White House. The only Obamas who show up in publicly released White House visitor logs are Said Obama and Sarah Obama, an aunt, who have visited just once in more than six years, and the president’s half brother Abongo, also known as Roy, who has visited three times.

Indeed, the president acknowledged that some at dinner here on Friday were strangers. “In these extended families, there are cousins and uncles and aunties that show up that you didn’t know existed but you’re always happy to meet,” the president said with a laugh. “And there were lengthy explanations in some cases of the connections. But it was a wonderful time.”

Mr. Obama had a long day of activities. He addressed the sixth annual Global Entrepreneurship Summit meeting, laid a wreath at a memorial to the victims of the 1998 bombing of the United States Embassy here and attended a state dinner in the evening, where he was serenaded in English and Swahili by a group that sang a song called “Coming Home.” In his toast, Mr. Obama joked that critics back home no doubt believed he had come “to look for my birth certificate,” adding, “That is not the case.”

He made no mention of Mr. Kenyatta’s indictment for crimes against humanity. Mr. Kenyatta and his deputy, William Ruto, were charged in the International Criminal Court with instigating violence after disputed 2007 elections that killed more than 1,000. The case against Mr. Kenyatta was dropped in December, but the charges stand against Mr. Ruto, who met with Mr. Obama.

Mr. Obama referred obliquely to that violence but praised a revised constitution adopted afterward, and said the subsequent election in 2013 that elevated Mr. Kenyatta and Mr. Ruto “showed growth in the election process.”

He defended his Power Africa initiative, a multibillion-dollar effort announced two years ago that has produced little electricity for a power-starved continent. “I would just point out that if you wanted to start a power plant in the United States, it doesn’t take a year to get that done,” he said.

Rejecting comparisons to President George W. Bush, whose efforts to curb AIDS and malaria in Africa are warmly remembered, he said, “This isn’t a beauty contest between presidents.”

The excitement at his visit was palpable from the gated homes with manicured lawns in grand old wealthy neighborhoods like Muthaiga and Karen to the slums of Kibera, where sewage runs in the street and families live in mud and tin shacks. “Obama is a source of inspiration to many,” said Babu Owino, president of the Kenya University Students Organization. “The students here love him so much. They are die-hard fans. When they look at his background, he’s someone they are able to identify with.”

So much so that before the visit, Mr. Owino wrote to the American ambassador here claiming at least 17 students had threatened to commit suicide if Mr. Obama did not visit the University of Nairobi. (The president did not, but no suicides were reported.)

Mr. Obama transcended the tribal differences that have divided society. Mr. Obama’s family is Luo while Mr. Kenyatta and his ruling elite are Kikuyu. But Solomon Wekesa, 31, a security guard who himself is Luya, said it did not matter to most Kenyans.

“In Obama, they see a man who does not see tribe, a man who is an open man,” he said. “He sees Kenya as one nation.”

Others hoped the visit would bring change. “I want Obama to push for reforms in Kenya’s fight against corruption to enable the poor access to a better livelihood,” said Nancy Ayako, 21, who lives in the Kibera slum settlement. “There are so many young people who have been marginalized, like slum dwellers.”

But expectations may have surpassed reality. For Rogers Mogaka, a community organizer, Mr. Obama’s visit came too late. “Why now?” he asked. “Look, he is not coming here to meet with the common man on the street.”

He added, “There are a number of issues that we think need to be addressed that affect the common man in Kenya.”

Reuben Kyama contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on July 26, 2015, on page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: An Upbeat Tone Mixes With Notes of Discord as Obama Visits Kenya.

Obama in Kenya: An Upbeat Tone, but Notes of Discord, Too,
NYT, JULY 25, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/26/world/africa/
in-kenya-obama-hails-africas-growth-and-potential.html

President Obama

Takes On the Prison Crisis

 

JULY 16, 2015

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Editorial

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

On Thursday, for the first time in American history, a president walked into a federal prison. President Obama was there to see for himself a small piece of the damage that the nation’s decades-long binge of mass incarceration has wrought.

Mr. Obama’s visit to El Reno, a medium-security prison in Oklahoma, capped off a week in which he spoke powerfully about the failings of a criminal justice system that has damaged an entire generation of Americans, locking up millions — disproportionately men of color — at a crippling cost to them, their families and communities, as well as to the taxpayers and society as a whole.

Speaking to reporters after touring the cells, Mr. Obama reflected on the people he met there. “These are young people who made mistakes that aren’t that different than the mistakes that I made, and the mistakes that a lot of you guys made. The difference is they did not have the kinds of support structures, the second chances, the resources that would allow them to survive those mistakes.”

This indisputable argument has been made by many others, most notably former Attorney General Eric Holder Jr., who was the administration’s most powerful advocate for sweeping justice reforms. But it is more significant coming from the president, not just in his words but in his actions. On Monday Mr. Obama commuted the sentences of 46 people, most serving 20 years or more, for nonviolent drug crimes. It was a tiny fraction of the more than 30,000 people seeking clemency, but the gesture recognized some of the injustices of America’s harsh justice system.

On Tuesday, in a wide-ranging speech to the N.A.A.C.P., Mr. Obama explained that people who commit violent crimes are not the reason for the exploding federal prison population over the last few decades. Most of the growth has come instead from nonviolent, low-level drug offenders caught up in absurdly harsh mandatory minimum sentences that bear no relation to the seriousness of their offense or to the maintenance of public safety.

“If you’re a low-level drug dealer, or you violate your parole, you owe some debt to society,” Mr. Obama said. “You have to be held accountable and make amends. But you don’t owe 20 years. You don’t owe a life sentence.”

Mandatory minimums like these should be reduced or eliminated completely, he said. Judges should have more discretion to shape sentences and to use alternatives to prison, like drug courts or community programs, that are cheaper and can be more effective at keeping people from returning to crime.

Mr. Obama also put a spotlight on intolerable conditions, like overuse of solitary confinement in which more than 80,000 inmates nationwide are held on any given day. Many are being punished for minor infractions or are suffering from mental illness. “Do we really think it makes sense to lock so many people alone in tiny cells for 23 hours a day, sometimes for months or even years at a time?” Mr. Obama asked. He said he asked the Justice Department to review this practice.

He talked about community investment, especially in early-childhood education and in lower-income minority communities, as the best way to stop crime before it starts. And he spoke of the importance of removing barriers to employment, housing and voting for former prisoners. “Justice is not only the absence of oppression,” Mr. Obama said, “it is the presence of opportunity.”

As Mr. Obama acknowledged, however, his powers are limited. Any comprehensive solution to this criminal justice catastrophe must come from Congress and the state legislatures which for decades enacted severe sentencing laws and countless other harmful measures. In recent years, the opposite trend has taken hold as lawmakers in both conservative and liberal states have reduced populations in state prisons — where the vast majority of inmates are held — as well as crime rates.

It’s time that Congress fixed the federal system. After failed efforts at reform, an ambitious new bill called the SAFE Justice Act is winning supporters, including, on Thursday, the House speaker, John Boehner, and may have enough bipartisan support to pass. It would, among several other helpful provisions, eliminate mandatory minimums for many low-level drug crimes and create educational and other programs in prison that have been shown to reduce recidivism.

One sign of how far the politics of criminal justice has shifted was a remark by former president Bill Clinton, who signed a 1994 law that played a key role in the soaring growth of America’s prison system. On Wednesday, Mr. Clinton said, “I signed a bill that made the problem worse. And I want to admit it.” It was a long overdue admission, and another notable moment in a week full of them.

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A version of this editorial appears in print on July 17, 2015, on page A26 of the New York edition with the headline: Mr. Obama Takes On the Prison Crisis.

President Obama Takes On the Prison Crisis,
NYT, July 16, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/17/opinion/
president-obama-takes-on-the-prison-crisis.html

President Obama:

Talk to Black America, Not at Us

JULY 2, 2015

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor

By DONOVAN X. RAMSEY

Is President Obama the scold of black America or its empathetic prophet?

With his remarks at the funeral for the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney a week ago, Mr. Obama looked out onto a sea of mostly black faces — under the gaze of the nation — and addressed the topic of racism head-on.

“For too long, we’ve been blind to the way past injustices continue to shape the present. Perhaps we see that now,” he said without flinching.

It was a bittersweet moment. Sweet because, for the first time in years, the president exercised some of his trademark audacity on behalf of black Americans instead of chiding us. Bitter because of the ghastly events in Charleston, S.C., that led to the shift in rhetoric.

“Perhaps this tragedy causes us to ask some tough questions about how we can permit so many of our children to languish in poverty, or attend dilapidated schools, or grow up without prospects for a job or for a career,” he said.

It was a departure from the president’s usual comments to and about black Americans, ones in which he typically forgoes those “tough questions” in favor of a focus on personal accountability, with an emphasis on the importance of fathers within families.

The president has said it is because he grew up fatherless that he focuses on family values in his remarks to black Americans. He thinks the issue is important, and uniquely important for us. He must also think it’s a way to connect with me, or audiences like me. I’m a black man who grew up without a father. Yet, to me, Mr. Obama’s finger-wagging on fatherhood has been disappointing almost beyond words.

In a 2008 Father’s Day speech before a black congregation in Chicago, Mr. Obama, then a candidate for the White House, took black dads to task. “Any fool can have a child,” he said. “That doesn’t make you a father. It’s the courage to raise a child that makes you a father.”

A few years later, when the president addressed the topic of gun violence before a group of students in Chicago, he said: “When a child opens fire on another child, there is a hole in that child’s heart that government can’t fill. Only community and parents and teachers and clergy can fill that hole.”

I graduated from Morehouse College before Mr. Obama gave a commencement address there in 2013. Despite what had by then become the president’s routine admonishment of black Americans, I held out hope for the powerful message he could deliver to graduates of the nation’s only institution dedicated to educating black men. I hoped that a black man who’d ascended to the presidency might offer brotherly career advice. I thought he might tackle policy — mass incarceration, student loans, economic inequality, funding for black colleges.

Or, I imagined, he would stand in front of 500 black men being conferred college degrees — young people on their way to graduate school or beginning careers despite tremendous odds — and say, This too is black America. Instead, that speech made headlines for its “no excuses” theme and its focus on fatherhood. “Be the best father you can be to your children,” President Obama told the new graduates, “Because nothing is more important.”

The president faced some criticism for the address at the time, including from Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic. At a panel discussion on poverty at Georgetown this May, Mr. Obama defended his message.

“It’s true that if I’m giving a commencement at Morehouse that I will have a conversation with young black men about taking responsibility as fathers that I probably will not have with the women of Barnard. And I make no apologies for that,” he said. “And the reason is, is because I am a black man who grew up without a father and I know the cost that I paid for that.”

The audience applauded. I was less enthusiastic.

Whether we’re confronting gun violence or graduating, the president’s message to black America has largely centered on absent black dads. At best, it has been armchair psychology delivered from the bully pulpit. At worst, a sleight of hand that diverts focus from policy questions and avoids a real discussion of discrimination. Either way, the reduction from citizen to statistic has been frustrating.

It is worthy of praise, of course, that the president of the United States cares about the status of American families, and black families in particular. Mr. Obama has, however, reserved his lectures on fatherhood for black Americans. And recent events suggest that, for that constituency in particular, the president should have more pressing concerns.

Trayvon Martin had an involved dad, as did Mike Brown. Both fathers fought for a conviction or indictment, respectively, in the killings of their sons and lost.

The absence of Barack Obama Sr. is a major theme of President Obama’s life story. It’s a thread that runs through his autobiography and is, in fact, the inspiration for that book’s title. Over the years, however, it has become increasingly clear that fatherlessness is a dominant lens through which Mr. Obama views not just himself but also the nation’s black men and boys at large.

As he assessed the legacy of Mr. Pinckney, the specter of derelict dads didn’t loom so large. In fact, black fatherlessness took another form, as the slain pastor’s daughters sat through their father’s funeral. Before them, the president was fully present as an advocate.

In eulogizing Mr. Pinckney, the president was forced — or allowed — to do something he rarely does: He acknowledged black America within the context of its undeniable struggle to exist in a nation at odds with our presence since its inception. He spoke for us, not just at us.

Donovan X. Ramsey is an Emerging Voices Fellow at Demos, a public policy organization.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on July 3, 2015, on page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: We Need Obama to Speak For Us, Not at Us.

President Obama: Talk to Black America, Not at Us,
NYT, JULY 2, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/03/opinion/
president-obama-talk-to-black-america-not-at-us.html

President Obama Condemns

Both the Baltimore Riots

and the Nation’s ‘Slow-Rolling Crisis’

 

APRIL 28, 2015

The New York Times

By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS

and MATT APUZZO

WASHINGTON — President Obama responded with passion and frustration on Tuesday to the violence that has rocked Baltimore and other cities after the deaths of young black men in confrontations with the police, calling for a period of soul-searching about what he said had become a near-weekly cycle of tragedy.

Speaking from the White House Rose Garden, Mr. Obama condemned the chaos unfolding just 40 miles north of the White House and called for “full transparency and accountability” in a Department of Justice investigation into the death of Freddie Gray, the young black man who died of a spinal cord injury suffered while in police custody.

He said that his thoughts were also with the police officers injured in Monday night’s unrest in Baltimore, which he said “underscores that that’s a tough job, and we have to keep that in mind.”

But in a carefully planned 14-minute statement during a news conference with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan, Mr. Obama made clear that he was deeply dismayed not only by the recent unrest in several cities but also by the longstanding yet little-discussed racial and societal forces that have fed it.

“We have seen too many instances of what appears to be police officers interacting with individuals, primarily African-American, often poor, in ways that raise troubling questions,” Mr. Obama said. “This has been a slow-rolling crisis. This has been going on for a long time. This is not new, and we shouldn’t pretend that it’s new.”

He spoke as Loretta E. Lynch, the new attorney general, dispatched two of her top deputies to Baltimore to handle the fallout: Vanita Gupta, her civil rights chief, and Ronald L. Davis, her community-policing director. The unrest there and the epidemic Mr. Obama described of troubled relations between white police officers and black citizens have consumed Ms. Lynch’s first two days on the job and could define her time in office.

They have also raised difficult and familiar questions for Mr. Obama about whether he and his administration are doing enough to confront the problem, questions made all the more poignant because he is the first African-American to occupy the White House.

The president struggled for balance in his remarks. He pushed back against critics who have said he should be more aggressive in his response to questionable practices by the police, saying: “I can’t federalize every police department in the country and force them to retrain.”

Mr. Obama also made clear that he had no sympathy for people rioting in the streets, calling them “a handful of people taking advantage of the situation for their own purposes,” who should “be treated as criminals.”

And he said that law enforcement officials and organizations that represent them must also admit that “there are some police who aren’t doing the right thing.”

But he emphasized that the problem went far beyond the police, who he said are too often deployed to “do the dirty work of containing the problems that arise” in broken urban communities where fathers are absent, drugs dominate and education, jobs and opportunities are nonexistent.

The president had initially avoided commenting on the unrest in Baltimore, allowing only still photographers into the Oval Office on Monday afternoon as he held an unscheduled meeting with Ms. Lynch, thus denying reporters the chance to ask him questions about the chaos then unfurling one state away. The issue dominated Ms. Lynch’s first day on the job, and her response to it will be watched closely. As he prepared to swear her in, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said that Ms. Lynch, the first black woman in the post, was uniquely qualified to bridge the divide between minority neighborhoods and police officers clashing over the use of deadly force. Within hours, Baltimore was in flames.

Ms. Lynch’s predecessor, Eric H. Holder Jr., the first black attorney general, was the face of the Obama administration’s response to unrest in Ferguson, Mo., last year after a white police officer killed an unarmed black teenager there, and he relished the opportunity to talk about policing and race relations.

It made him a hero of the civil rights movement, but drew sharp criticism from police groups who said the attorney general did not do enough to support them.

Ms. Lynch, a career prosecutor, came into office promising to strike a new tone and planned to visit police groups this summer. But the riots in Baltimore after the death of the 25-year-old Mr. Gray have overtaken that timeline. Almost as soon as she had taken her oath, there were signs that Baltimore was about to erupt.

As mourners gathered for Mr. Gray’s funeral, the police announced that three street gangs had pledged to work together to “take out” police officers. The University of Maryland shut down its Baltimore campus early, saying it had been warned that the area could soon turn violent.

A turbulent day in Baltimore ended with rioting by rock-throwing youths and a call to end the violence by religious leaders and the mother of Freddie Gray. By Axel Gerdau on Publish Date April 28, 2015.

At the Justice Department, Ms. Lynch was met by Ms. Gupta and Mr. Davis for a lengthy update on Baltimore. It was her first meeting as attorney general, and it led to the unscheduled trip to the White House to meet with Mr. Obama.

In one meeting on Tuesday, Ms. Lynch told officials that while in Baltimore, they should meet not only Mr. Gray’s family but also the officers who were most seriously injured. “When officers get injured in senseless violence, they become victims as well,” she said, a Justice Department official told reporters.

As night set in on Monday, chaos reigned on Baltimore’s streets. Rioters burned and looted businesses. Others hurled rocks. Police officers were injured, and the police commissioner said his department was outnumbered in its own city.

Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland activated the National Guard, sending hundreds of soldiers into the city after dawn on Tuesday.

Ms. Lynch issued a statement in which she condemned “the senseless acts of violence by some individuals in Baltimore that have resulted in harm to law enforcement officers, destruction of property and a shattering of the peace in the city.”

It was a message that Mr. Obama echoed on Tuesday, as he bristled at what he argued was the news media’s habit of focusing on dramatic images of brutality and chaos rather than on what have been mostly peaceful protests in Baltimore and other cities.

“One burning building will be looped on television over and over and over again, and thousands of demonstrators who did it the right way, I think, have been lost in the discussion,” Mr. Obama said.

He said the that “overwhelming majority” in Baltimore protested peacefully and went back into the streets Tuesday to clean up after “a handful of criminals and thugs who tore up the place.” Ms. Lynch, a child of the segregated South and the daughter of a local civil rights leader, has spoken of the need for police officers — because they wield the power — to repair broken relationships. But she has also spoken repeatedly about the police as a force for good in minority neighborhoods.

A version of this article appears in print on April 29, 2015, on page A15 of the New York edition with the headline: President Condemns Both the Riots and the Nation’s ‘Slow-Rolling Crisis’.

President Obama Condemns Both the Baltimore Riots
and the Nation’s ‘Slow-Rolling Crisis’, NYT, APRIL 28, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/29/us/politics/
events-in-baltimore-reflect-a-slow-rolling-crisis-across-us-obama-says.html

Regret Over a Drone’s Deadly Damage

APRIL 24, 2015

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Editorial

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

For years, the Obama administration has kept its drone strikes shrouded in great secrecy, knowing that what have been described as precision attacks on terrorist targets have also killed innocent civilians. So it was important to see candor and remorse from President Obama in his apology for the killing of two hostages held by Al Qaeda, an American and an Italian, in a drone strike near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in January.

“It is a cruel and bitter truth that in the fog of war generally and our fight against terrorists specifically, mistakes — sometimes deadly mistakes — can occur,” President Obama said on Thursday. “One of the things that makes us exceptional is our willingness to confront squarely our imperfections and to learn from our mistakes.”

The deaths of Warren Weinstein, an American development expert, and Giovanni Lo Porto, an Italian aid worker, were a disturbing reminder of the unintended consequences of an execution program of questionable legality. The administration sought to reduce the room for error in 2013, when Mr. Obama instructed the Central Intelligence Agency, which authorized the January strike, to make sure with “near certainty” that imminent strikes would not put civilians in harm’s way.

The stricter criterion was adopted in response to growing evidence that drone strikes had killed dozens of noncombatants. The Open Society Foundations said in a report in November that American drone strikes in Pakistan have killed more than 2,000 people, including an undetermined number of civilians. Drone strikes in Yemen have also killed civilians. Their use in both countries has incited deep resentment toward the United States.

The administration’s account of the January strike also raises serious questions about just how much intelligence officers have before dropping bombs into remote areas by hitting a switch half a world away.

Besides the two hostages, the strike killed Ahmed Farouq, an American citizen accused of having played a leading role in a Qaeda franchise in India. The White House also disclosed on Thursday that Adam Gadahn, an American who was a Qaeda spokesman, is believed to have been killed in a separate strike, also in January. Officials said that neither of the American Qaeda members was deliberately targeted.

“These and other recent strikes in which civilians were killed make clear that there is a significant gap between the relatively stringent standards the government says it’s using and the standards that are actually being used,” Jameel Jaffer, the deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement.

Drone strikes might be a tool of last resort to hunt down terrorists in areas where local governments are unwilling or unable to pursue them. But the risks involved in their use are high. Along with Mr. Obama’s apology, the administration says it will provide compensation to the Weinstein and Lo Porto families. The handling of this case stands in contrast to the silence it usually maintains about the civilian victims of drone strikes.

Mr. Obama has promised an independent review of the January attack. While that is important, the White House should go further to provide a fuller accounting of what it knows about the number of civilians killed by the drone-based counterterrorism campaign.

That information is critical to an informed debate about the merits of the program and how it is carried out.

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A version of this editorial appears in print on April 25, 2015, on page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: Regret Over a Drone’s Deadly Damage.

Regret Over a Drone’s Deadly Damage,
NYT, APRIL 24, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/25/opinion/regret-over-a-drones-deadly-damage.html

A New Phase in Anti-Obama Attacks

APRIL 11, 2015

The New York Times

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

SundayReview | Editorial

It is a peculiar, but unmistakable, phenomenon: As Barack Obama’s presidency heads into its twilight, the rage of the Republican establishment toward him is growing louder, angrier and more destructive.

Republican lawmakers in Washington and around the country have been focused on blocking Mr. Obama’s agenda and denigrating him personally since the day he took office in 2009. But even against that backdrop, and even by the dismal standards of political discourse today, the tone of the current attacks is disturbing. So is their evident intent — to undermine not just Mr. Obama’s policies, but his very legitimacy as president.

It is a line of attack that echoes Republicans’ earlier questioning of Mr. Obama’s American citizenship. Those attacks were blatantly racist in their message — reminding people that Mr. Obama was black, suggesting he was African, and planting the equally false idea that he was secretly Muslim. The current offensive is slightly more subtle, but it is impossible to dismiss the notion that race plays a role in it.

Perhaps the most outrageous example of the attack on the president’s legitimacy was a letter signed by 47 Republican senators to the leadership of Iran saying Mr. Obama had no authority to conclude negotiations over Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Try to imagine the outrage from Republicans if a similar group of Democrats had written to the Kremlin in 1986 telling Mikhail Gorbachev that President Ronald Reagan did not have the authority to negotiate a nuclear arms deal at the Reykjavik summit meeting that winter.

There is no functional difference between that example and the Iran talks, except that the congressional Republican caucus does not like Mr. Obama and wants to deny him any policy victory.

On April 3, Colbert King, a Washington Post columnist summarized a series of actions by Republicans attacking the president’s authority in areas that most Americans thought had been settled by the Civil War. Arizona legislators, for example, have been working on a bill that “prohibits this state or any of its political subdivisions from using any personnel or financial resources to enforce, administer or cooperate with an executive order issued by the president of the United States that has not been affirmed by a vote of Congress and signed into law as prescribed by the United States Constitution.”

The bill sounds an awful lot like John C. Calhoun’s secessionist screed of 1828, the South Carolina Exposition and Protest. Laurie Roberts of The Arizona Republic wrote that it was just “one of a series of kooky measures aimed at declaring our independence from federal gun laws, from the Affordable Care Act, from the Environmental Protection Agency, from the Department of Justice, from Barack Obama.”

Republicans defend this sort of action by accusing Mr. Obama of acting like a king and citing executive actions he has taken — on immigration and pollution among other things. That’s nonsense. The same Republicans had no objection when President George W. Bush used his executive authority to authorize the torture of terrorism suspects and tap the phones of American citizens. It is not executive orders the Republicans object to; it is Mr. Obama’s policies, and Mr. Obama.

The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, who declared war on the new president in 2009 as minority leader and used the filibuster to paralyze the Senate, essentially told foreign governments to ignore the carbon-emission goals Mr. Obama was trying to set by international agreement. Because climate-change deniers in Congress and in some states oppose the effort, setting those goals is pointless, Mr. McConnell pronounced last month.

If this insurrection is driven by something other than a blend of ideological extremism and personal animosity, it is not clear what that might be. But it is ugly, it deepens mistrust of government and it harms the office of the president, not just Mr. Obama.

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A version of this editorial appears in print on April 12, 2015, on page SR10 of the New York edition with the headline: A New Phase in Anti-Obama Attacks.

A New Phase in Anti-Obama Attacks,
NYT, April 11, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/12/opinion/sunday/a-new-phase-in-anti-obama-attacks.html

Obama Meets Raúl Castro,

Making History

APRIL 11, 2015

The New York Times

By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS

and RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD

PANAMA — President Obama and President Raúl Castro of Cuba met here Saturday in the first face-to-face discussion between the leaders of the two countries in a half-century.

Seated beside Mr. Castro in a small room in the convention center downtown where the Summit of the Americas was being held, Mr. Obama called it a “historic meeting.”

“Our governments will continue to have differences,” he said at a news conference wrapping up the summit meeting. “At the same time, we agreed that we can continue to take steps forward that advance our mutual interests.”

He called his meeting with Mr. Castro “candid and fruitful,” and said work would continue on the goal he announced in December of re-establishing diplomatic relations and reopening embassies in Havana and Washington.

Still, Mr. Obama said crucial steps in the normalization process would not be completed rapidly. He stopped short of announcing a final decision, now widely expected, to remove Cuba from the United States’ list of state sponsors of terrorism, saying he wanted to study it further.

For now, Mr. Obama argued, the best way to address the United States’ disagreements with Cuba and other countries in the hemisphere on such issues as human rights and democracy was by engaging with them.

“So often, when we insert ourselves in ways that go beyond persuasion, it’s counterproductive, it backfires,” he said, adding that was “why countries keep on trying to use us as an excuse for their own governance failures.”

“Let’s take away the excuse,” Mr. Obama said.

Mr. Castro said he wanted a new beginning with the United States despite the two countries’ “long and complicated history.” He added that “we are willing to discuss everything, but we need to be patient — very patient.”

The meeting on the sidelines of the Summit of the Americas was an important step for Mr. Obama as he seeks to ease tensions with Cuba and defuse a generations-old dispute that has also affected relations with the other countries of the region.

Since his first foray to the summit meeting three months after taking office, Mr. Obama has seen one bone of contention frustrate his efforts to reach out to the United States’ hemispheric neighbors: the fact that Cuba was blackballed from the gathering. He was scolded by Argentina’s president for maintaining an “anachronistic blockade,” lectured by Bolivia’s president about behaving “like a dictatorship,” and in 2012 blamed for the failure of leaders to agree on a joint declaration — the result, his Colombian host said, of the dispute over Cuba.

From left, President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico, President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil, President Juan Carlos Varela of Panama, President Obama and Luis Alberto Moreno, the president of the Inter-American Development Bank, in Panama on Friday.

This year, Mr. Obama came to the summit meeting here determined to change the dynamic with a series of overtures to Cuba. In addition to the meeting with Mr. Castro, 83, the gathering was the first time in the more than 20-year history of the summit meeting that Cuba was allowed to attend.

“The United States will not be imprisoned by the past — we’re looking to the future,” Mr. Obama, 53, said of his approach to Cuba at the summit meeting’s first plenary session on Saturday. “I’m not interested in having battles that frankly started before I was born.”

He said the shift in policy would be a turning point for the entire region. Mr. Castro, in a speech of more than 45 minutes that went well beyond the allotted eight minutes, spoke in unusually warm tones about an American president who has sought reconciliation with his country. But in a nod to allies like Venezuela that still support Cuba, he also delivered a lengthy diatribe on historical American injustices in the hemisphere.

Mr. Castro said he had read Mr. Obama’s books and praised his background as “humble.” He saluted his “brave” decision to take steps against a trade embargo against Cuba by using his executive powers to loosen a host of travel and commerce restrictions. And he thanked Mr. Obama for vowing a “rapid decision” on removing Cuba from the United States government’s list of states that sponsor international terrorism, a designation that has hobbled Cuba’s ability to bank with the United States and some foreign creditors.

Mr. Obama and Mr. Castro spent time during their hourlong meeting reflecting on the significance of the moment for Cubans, Americans and the entire region, said a senior administration official who would describe the private session only on the condition of anonymity. There was no tension in the room, the official said, but the two presidents did not agree on everything. While they both committed to opening embassies in each other’s countries, Mr. Obama stressed what has emerged as a sticking point in the talks over opening an American embassy in Havana: ensuring that diplomats could move freely around the country.

And Mr. Castro said he wanted to see the United States trade embargo against Cuba lifted, which Mr. Obama has called on Congress to do.

At a news conference, Bruno Rodríguez, the Cuban foreign minister, said his meeting with Secretary of State John Kerry on Thursday, and Mr. Castro’s with Mr. Obama, allowed the countries to draw closer. “A principal result is that these two governments now know each other better,” Mr. Rodríguez said. “We have a better understanding of our common ground, a better idea of our mutual interests” and “better knowledge of the scope and depth of our differences.”

For Mr. Obama, the summit meeting was a chance to showcase progress toward a goal he aspired to during the first Latin American summit meeting he attended — where he spoke of a “new beginning” with Cuba even in its absence — and to clear away what had become a dysfunctional subtext of the meeting for generations of American presidents.

“Our Cuba policy, instead of isolating Cuba, was isolating the United States in our own backyard,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, Mr. Obama’s deputy national security adviser for strategic communications. “This time, we arrived here, yes, certainly not agreeing with everybody on everything,” he said, but with “broad agreement with the leaders here that what the president did was the right thing.”

“It is going to open up the door not just to greater engagement with Cuba, but potentially more constructive relations across the hemisphere,” Mr. Rhodes said.

Several Latin American nations have criticized recent United States sanctions against several Venezuelan officials it has accused of human rights violations. But Mr. Obama’s overtures to Cuba, and his recent executive action on immigration to make it easier for some people who are in the United States without authorization to stay legally, have brought an unusual round of salutes and congratulations.

“President Obama is going to leave a legacy the way he is supporting Hispanics in the United States, and also his new policy for Cuba for us is very important,” President Juan Carlos Varela of Panama said just before meeting with Mr. Obama.

President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia, who demanded Cuba’s inclusion in this summit meeting as he closed the last one, in his country in 2012, also celebrated Cuba’s arrival.

“The Cuba situation has been an obstacle going back a long time in the relations of the United States with Latin America and the Caribbean, and without that obstacle the cooperation on many fronts will be more fluid,” he told the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo before arriving here.

It was a far cry from the last Summit of the Americas in 2012 in Cartagena, Colombia — marred by a prostitution scandal involving Secret Service agents — when some Latin American leaders openly berated Mr. Obama for the United States’ stance on excluding Cuba. Bolivia, Nicaragua and Venezuela said they would not attend again unless Cuba could.

The president ended that gathering with a testy lament, seemingly irritated by his inability to move past old disputes.

“Sometimes those controversies date back to before I was born,” Mr. Obama said in his closing news conference, adding that it felt at times as if “we’re caught in a time warp, going back to the 1950s and gunboat diplomacy, and ‘Yanquis’ and the Cold War, and this and that and the other.”

The meeting was not without reminders of the old animosities. It was marred by several clashes in the streets between Cuban dissidents and government representatives, one of whom accused the demonstrators of being paid by foreign governments, including the United States.

And President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela came to the summit meeting armed with a petition demanding that Mr. Obama lift sanctions that he imposed by executive order last month on members of the country’s government for human rights abuses.

“I respect you, but I don’t trust you, President Obama,” he said in a profanity-laced speech.

But longtime observers of the region said Mr. Obama’s move had robbed hemispheric neighbors of an oft-repeated knock against this American president and his predecessors.

“It opens the door for the U.S. government by removing this argument that has been a pretext and an issue that has been invoked, not only by Cuba but other countries in the region, as a distraction,” said José Miguel Vivanco, the director of the Latin America program at Human Rights Watch.

“The focus has been for so many years on the U.S. policy toward Cuba, not on the record of Cuba,” he added. “This puts the U.S. government and the Obama administration in a very different position with much more credibility when it comes to talking about democracy and human rights.”

A version of this article appears in print on April 12, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Obama Meets Cuban Leader, Making History.

Obama Meets Raúl Castro, Making History,
NYT, April 11, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/12/world/americas/obama-cuba-summit-of-the-americas.html

Obamas’ Tax Return

Shows Most Income Is From Salary

 

APRIL 10, 2015

The New York Times

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR

WASHINGTON — President Obama and his wife, Michelle, earned $477,383 in adjusted gross income in 2014, a slight decrease from the previous year, and paid $93,362 in federal taxes, according to a tax return released by the White House on Friday.

Most of Mr. Obama’s income comes from his $400,000 salary as president, and he now receives far less in royalties from his books than he did early in his presidency. In 2008 and 2009, Mr. Obama earned a total of $8.1 million from his two autobiographies, “Dreams From My Father” and “The Audacity of Hope.” In 2014, the royalties totaled $94,889.

White House officials released the tax return with little fanfare, as they have done in each year of Mr. Obama’s presidency. The return shows that the Obamas donated $70,712 — or about 15 percent of their income — to charity.

The largest gift was to Fisher House Foundation, a Chicago-based organization that provides accommodations for families of service members who are receiving treatment at military and veterans’ hospitals. The Obamas donated $22,012 to the group; in 2013 they gave $8,751, and in 2012 they donated $103,000.

White House officials said Mr. Obama’s tax bill was higher than it would otherwise have been because of policies that steered tax cuts to the middle class and limited tax breaks for the wealthy. The president also paid additional Medicare and investment income taxes, according to a post on the White House blog.

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his wife, Jill, reported earning $388,844 and paying taxes of $90,506. The Bidens contributed $7,380 to charity.
 

A version of this article appears in print on April 11, 2015, on page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: Obamas’ Tax Return Shows Most Income Is From Salary.

Obamas’ Tax Return Shows Most Income Is From Salary,
NYT, APRIL 10, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/11/us/politics/obamas-tax-return-shows-most-income-is-from-salary.html

Handshake for Obama

and Raúl Castro of Cuba

APRIL 10, 2015

The New York Times

By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS

and RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD

PANAMA CITY, Panama — President Obama and President Raúl Castro of Cuba shook hands here on Friday night, and American officials said they would hold discussions on Saturday during a gathering of regional leaders, in the first full-fledged meeting between presidents of the United States and Cuba in more than a half-century.

The expected encounter was not on Mr. Obama’s official schedule, but it held deep significance for the regional meeting, as the president’s move to ease tensions with Cuba has overshadowed the official agenda.

Mr. Obama is nearing a decision on removing Cuba’s three-decade-old designation as a state sponsor of terrorism, citing progress in the effort to re-establish diplomatic ties after half a century of hostilities.

He spoke by telephone with Mr. Castro before the gathering, and on Thursday, Secretary of State John Kerry met with Bruno Rodríguez, the Cuban foreign minister — the highest-level session between the governments in more than 50 years — to lay the groundwork for the advancing reconciliation. The much-anticipated handshake on Friday night came as leaders gathered for a welcome dinner, where Mr. Obama and Mr. Castro were seated at the same table, separated by two other people.

Before the official start of the summit meeting, Mr. Obama spoke at a civil society forum. “As we move toward the process of normalization, we’ll have our differences government-to-government with Cuba on many issues, just as we differ at times with other nations within the Americas,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with that, but I’m here to say that when we do speak out, we’re going to do so because the United States of America does believe, and will always stand for, a certain set of universal values.”

The president rushed through a packed schedule on Friday as the summit meeting got underway, beginning his day with a tour of the Panama Canal.

From left, President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico, President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil, President Juan Carlos Varela of Panama, President Obama and Luis Alberto Moreno, the president of the Inter-American Development Bank, in Panama on Friday.

At a forum with business executives Mr. Obama promoted a $1 billion investment package he has proposed for Central America in an effort to address the causes of the surge of immigrants across America’s southern border last summer. “The more we see our economies as mutually dependent rather than a zero-sum game, I think the more successful all of us will be,” he said.

Mr. Obama made it clear that he still had human rights concerns and was determined to discuss them openly. He held a lengthy meeting with civil society leaders from 12 other countries, including two from Cuba, after a speech at the forum in which he referred to the American civil rights and gay rights movements and to people who opposed apartheid in South Africa and Communism in the Soviet Union.

“Civil society is the conscience of our countries,” he said.

Cuba is attending the Summit of the Americas for the first time since the meeting’s inception in 1994. As senior Cuban and American officials spoke, people representing pro- and anti-Cuban government groups clashed for the third straight day on the sidelines, drawing a contrast with the diplomatic warming.

Hours before Mr. Obama arrived to address the civil society forum at a hotel here, members of groups sent by the Cuban government tried to block access to dissidents, calling them mercenaries who did not speak for Cuba.

At one point, amid angry chanting by the various groups, one of Cuba’s best-known government opponents, Guillermo Farinas, was jostled and manhandled as he tried to pass through a crowd of pro-Castro demonstrators.

“These aren’t really dissidents, they aren’t really interested in democracy and human rights,” Patricia Flechilla, a Cuban student and delegate at the summit meeting, told reporters, going on to repeat a familiar complaint from the Cuban government that opponents are paid and propped up by foreign governments, namely the United States.

The fracas interrupted the work of the forum, made up of nongovernmental groups from across the hemisphere, to produce a statement directed at the region’s leaders.

Later, before Mr. Obama arrived, scores of people waving Cuban flags and chanting “Long Live Fidel, Long Live Raúl” gathered outside the hotel.

Santiago Canton, executive director of RFK Partners for Human Rights at the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, said the presence of Cuba at the summit meeting would inevitably lead to discord that only highlighted the lack of democracy and human rights on the island. “People were sent by the Cuban government to disrupt everything going on, and they are doing that well,” he said after observing the clash. “Human rights and democracy are weak points on the Cuban side.”

Representatives of the Cuban delegation said they would withdraw from the civil society forum rather than “share space with mercenaries.”

A version of this article appears in print on April 11, 2015, on page A5 of the New York edition with the headline: Handshake for Obama And President of Cuba.

Handshake for Obama and Raúl Castro of Cuba,
NYT, APRIL 10, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/11/world/americas/cuba-us-obama-castro-terrorism.html

President Obama’s Letter to 22 Prisoners

 

APRIL 2, 2015

The New York Times

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

On Tuesday, 22 people serving sentences of decades or life for nonviolent drug crimes in federal prisons across the country received a personal letter from President Obama, commuting their sentences and ordering their release in late July.

Each had applied to Mr. Obama for clemency — a power the Constitution unreservedly grants the president as a way to correct injustices or offer forgiveness, but which has fallen into near-total disuse in recent decades. Before Tuesday, Mr. Obama ranked as the least merciful president in modern history.

Among the inmates are people like Francis Darrell Hayden, a Kentucky man who was sentenced to life for growing marijuana, and Rudolph Norris, serving 30 years for selling cocaine. In his letter, Mr. Obama warned the prisoners that after their release they would face the doubts of those who do not believe people with criminal records can change. “But remember that you have the capacity to make good choices,” he wrote. “I believe in your ability to prove the doubters wrong.”

It was a rare moment, and it underscored the critical role executive clemency can play in a justice system that far too often imposes punishments out of any reasonable proportion to the crime.

The commutations are part of a broader effort the Justice Department undertook last year to identify and encourage low-level, nonviolent federal inmates to apply for clemency if they meet certain criteria, such as having no “significant criminal history,” exhibiting good behavior in prison, and serving a sentence of longer than 10 years that would be shorter today because of changed laws.

To date, more than 8,000 applications have poured in to the pardon office, and more than 30,000 inquiries have been received by a coalition of volunteer defense lawyers assisting the administration.

There are clearly far more than 22 people deserving of a reduced sentence. For example, thousands of inmates are serving unjustly long sentences under an absurdly harsh law that treated one gram of crack cocaine the same as 100 grams of powder cocaine for sentencing purposes. The law was changed in 2010 to reduce that ratio by more than four-fifths, but it still applies only to future prosecutions. Mr. Obama could wait forever for Congress to make the law retroactive, or he could use his clemency power to tackle an obvious unfairness now.

But good intentions mean little without the resources to make them a reality. Staffing levels at the pardon office, which reviews clemency applications, have barely changed since 1996, even though the number of applications has increased more than eightfold since then.

Tuesday’s commutations also highlighted the damage caused by federal prosecutors who overcharge defendants who refuse to plead guilty — a common practice that effectively punishes people for exercising their constitutional right to a trial. Many of the sentences Mr. Obama commuted were the result of such overcharging.

Commuting 22 sentences was the right thing to do. As Congress dithers on sentencing reform, Mr. Obama should do more to show mercy to thousands of inmates who could be released without any threat to public safety.

A version of this editorial appears in print on April 2, 2015, on page A26 of the New York edition with the headline: President Obama’s Letter to 22 Prisoners.

President Obama’s Letter to 22 Prisoners,
NYT, April 2, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/02/opinion/president-obamas-letter-to-22-prisoners.html

Obama Removes Weapons Freeze

Against Egypt

MARCH 31, 2015

The New York Times

By PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — Seeking to repair relations with a longtime ally at a time of spreading war in the Middle East, President Obama on Tuesday lifted an arms freeze against Egypt that he had first imposed after the military overthrow of the country’s democratically elected government nearly two years ago.

Mr. Obama cleared the way for the delivery of F-16 aircraft, Harpoon missiles and M1A1 Abrams tanks, weapons prized by Egyptian leaders, who have smoldered at the suspension. In a telephone call, Mr. Obama assured President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt that he would support the full $1.3 billion in annual military assistance the Cairo government traditionally receives, even as others seek to cut it, the White House said.

The decision signaled a trade-off for a president who has spoken in support of democracy and human rights but finds himself in need of friends at a volatile time in a bloody part of the world. The White House made no effort to assert that Egypt had made the “credible progress” toward democracy that Mr. Obama demanded when he halted the arms deliveries in October 2013. Instead, the decision was justified as being “in the interest of U.S. national security,” as the White House put it in a statement.

Administration officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations, said the timing of the move was not directly related to the swirling crosscurrents now roiling the Middle East, including the widening conflict in Yemen, the rise of extremism in Libya, the battle with the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq or the possible nuclear deal with Iran.

But they said the broader perils of the region, particularly militant attacks in the Sinai Peninsula, had played an indirect role. “Given that higher level of threat, we felt it particularly important to make sure Egypt had all of the equipment it could possibly need to defend itself from these threats,” one of the officials said.

Beyond Sinai, Egypt faces multiple security issues. In February, it conducted an airstrike against Islamic militants in Libya in retaliation for the beheadings of a group of Egyptian Christians. Egypt has also said it will send ground troops into Yemen if necessary to support the Saudi-led operation against Iranian-backed Houthi rebels. And Egyptian leaders agreed in concept to create a combined military force with other Arab states.

Mr. Obama’s move will release 12 F-16 fighter jets, 20 Harpoon missiles, and the shells and parts necessary to assemble up to 125 M1A1 Abrams tanks that Egypt had previously paid for but that have been held up since 2013. The F-16s are especially important to Egyptian leaders, who have bitterly raised the issue with their American counterparts at nearly every opportunity.

Intended or not, experts said Mr. Obama’s decision would be interpreted as an effort by Washington to bolster a fragile position in the region. “The U.S. is facing quite a few challenges, and it needs to shore up relations with allies,” said Steven Simon, a former Middle East adviser to Mr. Obama now affiliated with Dartmouth. “The assistance to Egypt was always predicated on its foreign policy, not its domestic policy. That was certainly the Egyptian understanding of it.”

But other experts and human rights advocates said Mr. Obama had effectively capitulated to Mr. Sisi, a former general who helped lead the military overthrow of President Mohamed Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood government in 2013 and then won the presidency in an election tainted by wide-scale arrests of opposition figures. They compared Mr. Obama’s decision to lift the arms freeze to past instances when he did not live up to his own words, citing the “red line” he drew against Syrian use of chemical weapons in its civil war.

“Unsurprisingly, in this case you see that national security priorities, broadly defined, trump virtually everything else,” said Sarah Margon, the Washington director of Human Rights Watch. “And that’s a very myopic, short-term approach to fighting terrorism. Human rights abuses are actually a very bad counterterrorism strategy.”

According to Human Rights Watch and an Egyptian group called the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information, the Egyptian authorities arrested more than 40,000 people after Mr. Sisi’s removal of Mr. Morsi and have never provided a full accounting of the detentions.

Mr. Sisi’s government has cracked down on nongovernmental organizations that take foreign money and has authorized military courts to hold mass trials in terrorism cases that the rights groups call a way of suppressing protesters.

Amy Hawthorne, a senior fellow at the Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East at the Atlantic Council in Washington, said Mr. Obama’s decision would be seen as a victory by Egyptians who wore down American officials’ resistance.

“This isn’t their intention, but it will be read by Sisi as acceptance of his legitimacy and a desire to satisfy his demands in their relationship,” she said. “I’m still trying to understand, how do our concerns factor in?”

Mr. Obama’s decision does include elements that may irritate Mr. Sisi, however. Until now, Egypt and Israel were the only countries permitted to buy American arms by drawing credit from future foreign aid. Mr. Obama said he would halt that for Egypt, barring it from drawing in advance money expected in the 2018 fiscal year and beyond. He will also channel future military aid to four categories — counterterrorism, border security, maritime security and Sinai security — rather than give Egypt broad latitude to decide how to use it.

The change in policy is intended to wean Egypt away from large, expensive weapons systems that signal national prestige but are not suited to fighting the sort of insurgent and terrorist threats it now confronts, American officials said.

Without its aid already spoken for years in advance, Egypt will have more flexibility to make arms purchases to deal with immediate challenges. The United States will also have more flexibility to cut it off if future actions warrant, officials said.

Indeed, some scholars said the end of cash-flow financing, as it is called, was the most significant element of Mr. Obama’s announcement because the resumption of aid had been expected eventually.

“Now the military aid could be much more easily discontinued in the future,” said Michael Wahid Hanna, a researcher at the Century Foundation in New York. “This is a very far-reaching step.”

Bernadette Meehan, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, said the release of the weapons did not mean that the United States would stop pressing Egypt to ease its domestic repression of dissent.

“We will continue to engage with Egypt frankly and directly on its political trajectory and to raise human rights and political reform issues at the highest levels,” she said.

David D. Kirkpatrick contributed reporting from Cairo.

A version of this article appears in print on April 1, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Obama Removes Weapons Freeze Against Egypt.

Obama Removes Weapons Freeze Against Egypt,
NYT, MARCH 31, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/01/world/middleeast/obama-lifts-arms-freeze-against-egypt.html

Obama’s Strategy on Climate Change,

Part of Global Deal, Is Revealed

 

MARCH 31, 2015

The New York Times

By CORAL DAVENPORT

WASHINGTON — The White House on Tuesday introduced President Obama’s blueprint for cutting greenhouse gas emissions in the United States by nearly a third over the next decade.

Mr. Obama’s plan, part of a formal written submission to the United Nations ahead of efforts to forge a global climate change accord in Paris in December, detailed the United States’ part of an ambitious joint pledge made by Mr. Obama and President Xi Jinping of China in November.

The United States and China are the world’s two largest greenhouse gas polluters. Mr. Obama said the United States would cut its emissions by 26 to 28 percent by 2025, while Mr. Xi said that China’s emissions would drop after 2030.

Mr. Obama’s new blueprint brings together several domestic initiatives that were already in the works, including freezing construction of new coal-fired power plants, increasing the fuel economy of vehicles and plugging methane leaks from oil and gas production. It is meant to describe how the United States will lead by example and meet its pledge for cutting emissions.

But the plan’s reliance on executive authority is an acknowledgment that any proposal to pass climate change legislation would be blocked by the Republican-controlled Congress.

At the heart of the plan are ambitious but politically contentious Environmental Protection Agency regulations meant to drastically cut planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions from the nation’s cars and coal-fired power plants. The plan also relies on a speedy timetable, which assumes that Mr. Obama’s administration will issue and begin enacting all such regulations before he leaves office.

“We can achieve this goal using laws that are already on the books, and it will be in place by the time the president leaves office,” said Brian C. Deese, Mr. Obama’s senior adviser on climate change.

But the plan has also intensified opposition from Republican lawmakers who object to Mr. Obama’s effort to build a climate change legacy. Republicans have called the rules a “war on coal” and an abuse of executive authority. Nearly every potential Republican presidential candidate has criticized Mr. Obama’s climate change agenda. The issue is expected to be important in 2016 political campaigns, with Republican candidates vowing to undo Mr. Obama’s E.P.A. regulations.

Republican leaders immediately savaged the plan Tuesday and announced their intent to weaken or undo it — and, by extension, to block the international efforts to reach a climate accord in Paris.

“Even if the job-killing and likely illegal Clean Power Plan were fully implemented, the United States could not meet the targets laid out in this proposed new plan,” said Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader and Republican from Kentucky, who has been a vocal critic of the president’s plan.

“Considering that two-thirds of the U.S. federal government hasn’t even signed off on the Clean Power Plan and 13 states have already pledged to fight it,” Mr. McConnell continued, “our international partners should proceed with caution before entering into a binding, unattainable deal.”

Environmental groups praised the plan, particularly the president’s effort to work around Congress.

“The United States’ proposal shows that it is ready to lead by example on the climate crisis,” said Jennifer Morgan, an expert on international climate negotiations at the World Resources Institute, a Washington research organization. The research of Ms. Morgan’s group has concluded that the United States can substantially reduce greenhouse gas emissions under existing federal authority.

However, environmental groups also said far deeper cuts are necessary beyond 2025 to stave off the most devastating effects of climate change.

“In fact the U.S. must do more than just deliver on this pledge — the 28 percent domestic target can and must be a floor, not a ceiling,” said Lou Leonard, vice president for climate change policy with the conservation group World Wildlife Fund.

Republicans also adamantly oppose Mr. Obama’s efforts to reach the United Nations accord in Paris. To bypass the Senate — which would have to ratify United States involvement in a foreign treaty — Secretary of State John Kerry and other diplomatic officials are working closely with their foreign counterparts to ensure that the Paris deal does not legally qualify as a treaty.

Senator Roy Blunt, a Missouri Republican, has put together legislation intended to nullify Mr. Obama’s international climate change agreements. Republican leaders may try to add that as an amendment to must-pass legislation, like a critical spending measure later this year, to force the hands of Mr. Obama and other Democrats.

“Just as we witnessed throughout recent negotiations with Iran and during the previous climate agreement with China, President Obama and his administration act as if Congress has no role in these discussions. That’s just flat-out wrong,” Mr. Blunt said in a written statement.

“We will not stand by and allow the president to unilaterally enact bad energy policies that hurt our nation’s poorest families and young people the most,” he added. “I’ll continue working with my colleagues to ensure Americans’ voices are heard.”

Todd D. Stern, the State Department’s chief envoy on climate change, is telling other countries that the elements of Mr. Obama’s plan will stay in place despite Republican opposition.

“Undoing the kind of regulation we’re putting in place is very tough,” he said.

However, the rules have already come under legal assault. Republicans intend to stress to other nations that the regulations could still fall to legal challenges.

There is also growing concern that most other countries have yet to submit similar plans. At a United Nations accord signed in Lima, Peru, in December, countries agreed to submit their plans to one of the organization’s websites by the end of March. Climate policy experts said keeping to that timetable was important, so that each government prepared and analyzed its own domestic climate change plans and those of other nations.

But as of Tuesday, only the European Union, Mexico, Norway and Switzerland had done so. Most of the rest of the world’s major polluters — including China, India, Brazil and Russia — are not expected to submit plans until at least June, and some expect delays until at least October.

The longer countries wait to submit their plans, experts say, the harder it could be to achieve a substantial agreement in December.

A version of this article appears in print on April 1, 2015, on page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: Obama’s Strategy on Climate Change, Part of Global Deal, Is Revealed.

Obama’s Strategy on Climate Change, Part of Global Deal, Is Revealed,
NYT,  MARCH 31, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/01/us/obama-to-offer-major-blueprint-on-climate-change.html

Obama, at Selma Memorial, Says,

‘We Know the March Is Not Yet Over’

 

MARCH 7, 2015

The New York Times

By PETER BAKER

and RICHARD FAUSSET

SELMA, Ala. — As a new generation struggles over race and power in America, President Obama and a host of political figures from both parties came here on Saturday, to the site of one of the most searing days of the civil rights era, to reflect on how far the country has come and how far it still has to go.

Fifty years after peaceful protesters trying to cross a bridge were beaten by police officers with billy clubs, shocking the nation and leading to passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, the nation’s first African-American president led a bipartisan, biracial testimonial to the pioneers whose courage helped pave the way for his own election to the highest office of the land.

But coming just days after Mr. Obama’s Justice Department excoriated the police department of Ferguson, Mo., as a hotbed of racist oppression, even as it cleared a white officer in the killing of an unarmed black teenager, the anniversary seemed more than a commemoration of long-ago events on a black-and-white newsreel. Instead, it provided a moment to measure the country’s far narrower, and yet stubbornly persistent, divide in black-and-white reality.

In an address at the scene of what became known as “Bloody Sunday,” Mr. Obama rejected the notion that race relations have not improved since then, despite the string of police shootings that have provoked demonstrations. “What happened in Ferguson may not be unique,” he said, “but it’s no longer endemic. It’s no longer sanctioned by law or custom, and before the civil rights movement, it most surely was.”

But the president also rejected the notion that racism has been defeated. “We don’t need the Ferguson report to know that’s not true,” he said. “We just need to open our eyes and our ears and our hearts to know that this nation’s racial history still casts its long shadow upon us. We know the march is not yet over; we know the race is not yet won. We know reaching that blessed destination where we are judged by the content of our character requires admitting as much.”

An estimated 40,000 people, most but not all African-American, gathered on a sunny, warm day in this small town of elegant if weathered homes and buildings to mark the occasion. The celebration had a festival feeling, with vendors hawking barbecue, funnel cakes, hamburgers and posters of Mr. Obama, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Muhammad Ali and others. They came from near and far, some lining up before 6:30 a.m. to make sure they got in.

Ferguson was on the minds of many. Dontey Carter, 24, even came from Ferguson, saying he wanted to make a connection with protests he took part in back in Missouri. “I feel like it’s critical for me to be here,” said Mr. Carter, wearing a T-shirt with the words “We Are Justice” on the front. “The same tactics they used in Ferguson is kind of close to what they did here.”

Bridgette Traveler, 48, a disabled Army veteran who came from Shreveport, La., was in Ferguson last year protesting the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown.

“We have a long way to go when Michael Brown was killed for just walking down the street,” Ms. Traveler said.

Some attendees still angry about the Ferguson case interrupted Mr. Obama’s speech, banging a drum, holding up signs that read “Stop the Violence” and chanting “We Want Change.” Others in the audience tried to quiet those responsible for the outbursts, but eventually police officers — three white and two black — carried off one protester.

Joining Mr. Obama on Saturday was former President George W. Bush, who signed the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act in 2006, as well as more than 100 members of Congress. About two dozen of them were Republicans, including the House majority leader, Kevin McCarthy of California. While sitting onstage, Mr. Bush made no remarks, but rose to his feet to applaud Mr. Obama, and the two men hugged afterward.

Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio and Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican majority leader, did not attend, nor did most Republican presidential candidates, who were in Iowa campaigning. But the Republican-led Congress voted to award the Congressional Gold Medal to the “foot soldiers” of Bloody Sunday as “an expression of our affection and admiration for those who risked everything for their rights,” as Mr. Boehner put it.

Several prominent Democrats were missing, too. Former President Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is preparing to run for the White House next year, were in Miami for an event sponsored by the Clinton Global Initiative. In the Clintons’ adopted state of New York, about 250 people marched across the Brooklyn Bridge in commemoration of Selma.

Gov. Robert Bentley, a Republican who spoke in Selma on Saturday, said he hoped the occasion would show how much Alabama has changed. “We want people in America and the world to realize that Alabama is a different place and a different state than it was 50 years ago,” Mr. Bentley said in an interview. “It has become probably as much of a colorblind state as any state in the country, and we’re very proud of the advancement we’ve made.”

But that was not a universal view in a state where Mr. Obama received just 15 percent of the white vote in 2012.

“I think in many ways we’ve gone backwards on race in this country,” former Representative Artur Davis of Alabama, who is African-American and switched parties to become a Republican, said in an interview. “There’s obviously a very deep racial divide in Alabama when it comes to President Obama.”

Alabama is also on the front lines of what some see as the modern-day successor to the civil rights movement. Although a federal court threw out the state’s ban on same-sex marriage, Alabama’s Supreme Court has tried to block the issuance of marriage certificates. Mr. Obama made several references to gay rights but did not directly address the fight over marriage in Alabama.

He did take the opportunity to implicitly fire back at Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York mayor, who recently questioned his patriotism. The president cited the bravery of the marchers who risked everything 50 years ago to stand up for their rights.

“That’s what it means to love America,” Mr. Obama said. “That’s what it means to believe in America. That’s what it means when we say America is exceptional.” The president added later in his address, “That’s what America is, not stock photos or airbrushed history or feeble attempts to define some of us as more American as others.“

The events of March 7, 1965, proved a turning point in the civil rights movement, recently depicted in the movie “Selma.” When 600 demonstrators embarking on a 50-mile march to Montgomery for voting rights crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named for a grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, state troopers and Sheriff Jim Clark’s posse attacked with billy clubs and tear gas. Among the 17 hospitalized was John Lewis, who suffered a skull fracture. National revulsion helped President Lyndon B. Johnson push the Voting Rights Act through Congress.

Mr. Lewis, 74, who has gone on to a long career in Congress, was on hand Saturday, as were Mr. Johnson’s daughters and a daughter of George Wallace, Alabama’s segregationist governor. The crowd turned exceptionally quiet as Mr. Lewis, speaking in the deep preacher’s cadence for which he is famous, turned around, looked at the bridge where he was nearly killed and described what it was like on that day. “Our country will never be the same because of what happened on this bridge,” he said.

A voting rights workshop later in the day underscored the continuing battles over the law. The Supreme Court struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, in effect deeming it outdated and freeing nine states, including Alabama, to change election laws without advance approval. Mr. Obama called on lawmakers here to return to Washington and pass legislation reviving the act.

But in an era of low turnout, the president said Americans as a whole needed to use their franchise. “What’s our excuse today for not voting?” he asked. “How do we so casually discard the right for which so many fought? How do we so fully give away our power, our voice, in shaping America’s future?”

Correction: March 7, 2015

A picture caption with an earlier version of this article misidentified the city in Alabama where President Obama was photographed. It was in Montgomery, Ala., not Selma, Ala.

Julie Hirschfeld Davis contributed reporting from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on March 8, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Work of Selma ‘Not Yet Over,’ President Says.

Obama, at Selma Memorial, Says, ‘We Know the March Is Not Yet Over’, NYT,
MARCH 7, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/08/us/obama-in-selma-for-edmund-pettus-bridge-attack-anniversary.html

Urging Persistence on Racial Gains,

Obama Recalls Sacrifice in Selma

MARCH 6, 2015

The New York Times

By PETER BAKER

and JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS

COLUMBIA, S.C. — For the nation’s first African-American president, it was a week of two documents that told the story of a country still grappling with its own history.

The first was a draft speech that President Obama was marking up with his distinctive left-hand scrawl to deliver in Selma, Ala., on Saturday to celebrate a half-century of civil rights gains. The second was a report he received accusing the police in Ferguson, Mo., of systematically discriminating against African-Americans.

More than once, Mr. Obama has credited the courage of protesters in Selma who were confronted by club-wielding state troopers 50 years ago for clearing the way for his own barrier-breaking election as president. But the path from Selma to the Oval Office has also led to Ferguson and back to Selma, a path littered with hope and progress and disappointment and setback.

“What happened in Ferguson is not a complete aberration,” Mr. Obama told a young African-American man who asked him about it Friday at Benedict College, a historically black school. “It’s not just a one-time thing. It’s something that happens.”
Continue reading the main story
Report: What Is Wrong With the Ferguson Police Department?

In a scathing report released Wednesday, the Justice Department concluded that the Ferguson Police Department had been routinely violating the constitutional rights of its black residents.

And so, he added, “Our task is to work together to solve the problem and not get caught up in either the cynicism that says this is never going to change because everybody is racist. That’s not a good solution.”

“That’s not what the folks in Selma did,” he added. “They had confidence that they could change things, and change people’s hearts and minds.”

Eight years after Mr. Obama first spoke at Selma, the dream of a post-racial society that some foresaw in his rise to power has receded into a murkier reality.

Mr. Obama presides over a country where blacks are still twice as likely to be unemployed as whites; where gaps in income and wealth between races are widening rather than closing; where blacks are five times likelier to be in prison and young black men are nine times as likely to be killed in a homicide as their white counterparts; and where blacks get sick more, die younger and own less.

“When you look at all the statistics, I don’t know that the last six years have been particularly good for people of color,” said Senator Tim Scott, a Republican from South Carolina and one of two black members of the Senate. “And when you look at race relations, I think you could say at best they’re where they were before six years ago.”

He went on: “I don’t know that you can lay that on the shoulders of one person, but when you look at the policies” enacted by Mr. Obama, they “have had a miserable impact on the country.”

To Mr. Obama’s supporters, the fierce opposition to his presidency has been fueled by race, even if that is not openly acknowledged.

And in that regard, paradoxically, race relations may seem worse today than before he was elected. A new CBS News poll found that 50 percent of African Americans think real progress has been made in getting rid of racial discrimination, down from 59 percent last summer before episodes in Ferguson and elsewhere involving police officers and black suspects.

“For many people it feels worse because we have seen such a reaction to this presidency that has been really alarming and without question from many quarters has been based in part on his race,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “His candidacy suggested we had reached a new moment in America, and I think some people overestimated the meaning of that moment.”

Many of Mr. Obama’s supporters blame his opponents. “I think the president has done all he could do,” said George E. Battle Jr., senior bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. “But sometimes I think once the president was elected, we thought he could do everything. But he can’t. When you have governors and you have senators and you have Congress people determined to turn back the clock, there’s not that much the president can do other than getting on the stump.”

Consumed by the economy and health care, and with re-election ahead, Mr. Obama avoided focusing much on race in his first term. He has argued that restoring the economy and expanding health care were in fact policies that disproportionately helped African Americans. Indeed, 1.7 million more blacks have health insurance coverage now, with the drop in uninsured larger among blacks than whites.

But lately, with the economy on the mend and re-election behind him, Mr. Obama has more actively engaged on issues like voting rights and disparities in the criminal justice system.

And advisers said no one should underestimate the continuing power of Mr. Obama’s presence in the Oval Office. “By breaking through that barrier, there are children growing up today who think it’s perfectly normal to have an African-American president because that’s all they have ever known,” said Valerie Jarrett, his senior adviser.

Still, she added that it was not enough. “This is no time for us to rest on our laurels,” she said. “The fact that there are states that are trying to make it harder to vote 50 years after the Voting Rights Act is an indication that there’s still work to do.”

Mr. Obama seldom speaks at length about his views of the role that race plays in today’s politics or the opposition to his policies. At a session with civil rights and religious leaders recently, he focused on policy proposals instead of ruminating on racial tensions, said Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League.

But Mr. Morial said the president’s policies were his way of addressing persistent issues in America, citing health care. “The things he’s done I think clearly indicate that race and leaving a legacy on race are very important to his presidency,” he said.

Peter Baker reported from Columbia, and Julie Hirschfeld Davis from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on March 7, 2015, on page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: Urging Persistence on Racial Gains, Obama Recalls Sacrifice in Selma.

Urging Persistence on Racial Gains, Obama Recalls Sacrifice in Selma,
NYT, MAR. 6, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/07/us/politics/obama-backs-justice-departments-decision-not-to-indict-ferguson-officer.html

For Netanyahu and Obama,

Difference Over Iran Widened Into Chasm

MARCH 3, 2015

The New York Times

By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON — Over six years of bitter disagreements about how to deal with the Iranian nuclear threat, President Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel kept running into one central problem: The two leaders never described their ultimate goal in quite the same way.

Mr. Obama has repeated a seemingly simple vow: On his watch, the United States would do whatever it took to “prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.” Mr. Netanyahu has used a different set of stock phrases. Iran had to be stopped from getting the “capability” to manufacture a weapon, he said, and Israel could never tolerate an Iran that was a “threshold nuclear state.”

That semantic difference has now widened into a strategic chasm that threatens to imperil the American-Israeli relationship for years to come, and to upend the most audacious diplomatic gamble by an American leader since President Richard M. Nixon’s opening to China.

For years, Mr. Obama and Mr. Netanyahu avoided direct discussion of the philosophic and practical differences between an Iran on the verge of having the ultimate weapon and an Iran that actually possesses one. But it lies at the heart of the argument that Mr. Netanyahu is pressing before a joint session of Congress on Tuesday morning.

“It’s a distinction with a huge difference,” said Robert Einhorn, who helped formulate the administration’s Iran strategy at the State Department and enforced the sanctions that helped force Tehran into the difficult negotiations that followed. “It defines two different approaches to dealing with Iran that today may be fundamentally irreconcilable.”

In short, Israel would eliminate Iran’s nuclear capability, and the United States would permit a limited one.

The emotions surrounding Mr. Netanyahu’s decision to do an end run around the White House and appear before Congress at the invitation of the Republican leadership has obscured what the two countries’ approaches would look like. Mr. Netanyahu has simplicity and recent history on his side. Mr. Obama has practicality on his, along with a compelling case that his Israeli counterpart has yet to come up with a better approach that would not most likely lead to military conflict.

The essence of Mr. Netanyahu’s case is that the only way to make sure Iran never gets a bomb is for it to dismantle all of its nuclear facilities — from the uranium enrichment plants at Natanz and Fordo to the heavy-water plutonium reactor at Arak, along with the mines that produce uranium ore and the laboratories where Iranian scientists are believed to have worked on bomb designs. It is a maximalist position based on a belief that Iran’s long history of nuclear deception means that any facilities left in place would eventually be put to use.

“We’ve seen this kind of agreement before — between the U.S. and North Korea,” Yuval Steinitz, the Israeli minister for intelligence, said on a visit to Washington late last year. He was referring to a deal of the George W. Bush administration requiring North Korea to “disable” its main nuclear facilities, and to the dramatic implosion in 2008 of the cooling tower at one of its main nuclear reactors. Seven years later, the North Koreans have rebuilt and are back in business — and by some estimates, they are poised to build bombs faster than ever.
Continue reading the main story

The problem with the dismantle-it-all approach is that the Iranians have made clear that it is a deal they would never sign. For all the suspicions swirling around Iran’s program, the country is a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty — a treaty that Israel, India and Pakistan never signed. (North Korea pulled out.) Iran argues that signatories have a “right to enrich,” something the Obama administration obliquely acknowledged at the start of the current negotiations, nearly two years ago.

So Mr. Obama’s strategy has been one of buying time. That sounds like a concession, but it has worked well with Iran for two decades. No nation has spent more years seemingly trying to build a weapon but failing to get there. American intelligence agencies say that is because Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has never made the “political decision” to build a bomb.

But that is only part of the answer. The United States and its allies have done their part to slow Iran’s efforts, blocking the shipment of needed technology, imposing sanctions on the country’s oil exports, slipping faulty parts into its supply chain and attacking the country’s nuclear facilities with one of the most sophisticated cyberweapons ever developed.

Mr. Obama’s approach is based in part on a bet that time remains on America’s side. Eventually, the administration’s thinking goes, the clerical government in Iran will fall or be eased from power, and a more progressive leadership will determine that Iran does not need a weapon. But the implicit gamble of the accord now under discussion is that the long-awaited change will occur within 15 years, when the deal would expire and Iran would be free to build 180,000 advanced centrifuges the supreme leader spoke about last summer.

If Iran had that many machines to enrich uranium — a big if — it would have the capacity to make a bomb’s worth of uranium every week or so.

Even a far smaller number of centrifuges worries the Israelis and many of their gulf neighbors. Three years ago, the Obama administration was talking about letting Iran keep a few hundred machines spinning in a “pilot” plant, essentially a face-saving capacity. Then the figure rose to 1,500 centrifuges. Now, 4,000 to 6,500 are under consideration.

“The Iranians give up no capability in their possession,” Maj. Gen. Yaakov Amidror, a former Israeli national security adviser, wrote over the weekend, “they only postpone their intention to fulfill those capabilities.”

The critique stings Secretary of State John Kerry, who is negotiating the accord in Switzerland, but he will not discuss it, citing the confidentiality of the talks. But that secrecy is costing him support every day, in Congress and from his allies in the Persian Gulf.

“I just saw him, and he wouldn’t offer up any details,” said one senior official from a gulf nation who spoke on the condition of anonymity because his conversations at the State Department were private. “What am I supposed to conclude from that?”

In fact, there is a case to be made that the number of spinning centrifuges is only one factor in how long it would take Iran to get to a bomb. If Iran ships enough of its fuel out of the country, in a deal with Russia that has largely been struck, officials say, there would be precious little nuclear fuel to enrich.

If the remaining centrifuges are connected to one another in ways that can produce only reactor-grade uranium, it would essentially limit Iran’s options — as long as inspectors were present every few days or weeks, so that they could raise the alarm if the machines were reconfigured to make bomb fuel.

But those arguments require some knowledge of the physics of enriching uranium, and they will be hashed out in an environment where politics, not engineering, will dominate the debate. Mr. Kerry says he is ready for that. “We’re not about to jump into something we don’t believe can get the job done,” he said while traveling in Europe on Monday.

But then he turned to what may be his most effective argument: Mr. Netanyahu has yet to come up with a plan that does not ultimately lead to a decision to take military action to wipe out Iran’s facilities.

“You can’t bomb knowledge into oblivion unless you kill everybody,” Mr. Kerry said. “You can’t bomb it away. People have a knowledge here.”

The key, he said, was “intrusive inspections” and “all the insights necessary to be able to know to a certainty that the program is, in fact, peaceful.”

And there lies the problem for the White House. It is easy to make verification measures sound tough, but it is hard to enforce them. Dennis B. Ross, who worked for Mr. Obama from 2009 to 2011 and focused on the issue of Iran, wrote recently that the deal must have “anywhere, anytime access to all declared and undeclared facilities.”

As part of Mr. Obama’s selling of the agreement, Mr. Ross argued, he should specifically describe how the United States would respond to any race for the bomb, including the use of military force.

For his part, Mr. Obama says the use of force is implicit in a promise he made two years ago that “we’ve got Israel’s back.”

Mr. Netanyahu once pretended to welcome those words. His speech on Tuesday is testament to the fact that, rightly or wrongly, he no longer believes them.

For Netanyahu and Obama,
Difference Over Iran Widened Into Chasm, NYT,
MAR. 3, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/04/us/politics/obama-netanyahu-iran-dispute.html

Obama Vetoes Bill

Pushing Pipeline Approval

 

FEB. 24, 2015

The New York Times

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR

and CORAL DAVENPORT

WASHINGTON — President Obama on Tuesday rejected an attempt by lawmakers to force his hand on the Keystone XL oil pipeline, using his veto pen to sweep aside one of the first major challenges to his authority by the new Republican Congress.

With no fanfare and a 104-word letter to the Senate, Mr. Obama vetoed legislation to authorize construction of a 1,179-mile pipeline that would carry 800,000 barrels of heavy petroleum a day from the oil sands of Alberta to ports and refineries on the Gulf Coast.

In exercising the unique power of the Oval Office for only the third time since his election in 2008, Mr. Obama accused lawmakers of seeking to circumvent the administration’s approval process for the pipeline by cutting short “consideration of issues that could bear on our national interest.”

By rejecting the legislation, Mr. Obama retains the right to make a final judgment on the pipeline on his own timeline. But he did little to calm the political debate over Keystone, which has become a symbol of the continuing struggle between environmentalists and conservatives.

Backers of the pipeline denounced Mr. Obama’s actions and vowed to keep fighting for its construction.

The House speaker, John A. Boehner of Ohio, called the president’s veto “a national embarrassment” and accused Mr. Obama of being “too close to environmental extremists” and “too invested in left-fringe politics.”

Environmentalists quickly hailed the decision, which they said clearly indicated Mr. Obama’s intention to reject the pipeline’s construction. The White House has said the president will decide whether to allow the pipeline when all of the environmental reviews are completed in the coming weeks.

“Republicans in Congress continued to waste everyone’s time with a bill destined to go nowhere, just to satisfy the agenda of their big oil allies,” said Michael Brune, the executive director of the Sierra Club. “The president has all the evidence he needs to reject Keystone XL now, and we are confident that he will.”

Since 2011, the proposed Keystone pipeline has emerged as a broader symbol of the partisan political clash over energy, climate change and the economy.

Most energy policy experts say the project will have a minimal impact on jobs and climate. But Republicans insist that the pipeline will increase employment by linking the United States to an energy supply from a friendly neighbor. Environmentalists say it will contribute to ecological destruction and damaging climate change.

Mr. Obama has hinted that he thinks both sides have inflated their arguments, but he has not said what he will decide.

In his State of the Union address last month, Mr. Obama urged lawmakers to move past the pipeline debate, calling for passage of a comprehensive infrastructure plan. “Let’s set our sights higher than a single oil pipeline,” he said.

Republican leaders had promised to use the veto, which was expected, to denounce Mr. Obama as a partisan obstructionist. They made good on that promise minutes after the president’s veto message was read on the floor of the Senate on Tuesday.

“The fact he vetoed the bipartisan Keystone Pipeline in private shows how out of step he is with the priorities of the American people, who overwhelmingly support this vital jobs and infrastructure project,” Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, said in a statement.

In recent months, the environmental activists — who have spent years marching, protesting and getting arrested outside the White House in their quest to persuade Mr. Obama to reject the project — have said they are increasingly optimistic that their efforts will succeed.

“Hopefully the ongoing legislative charade has strengthened his commitment to do the right thing,” said Bill McKibben, a founder of the group 350.org, which has led the campaign to urge Mr. Obama to reject the pipeline.

The debate began in 2008, when the TransCanada Corporation applied for a permit to construct the pipeline. The State Department is required to determine whether the pipeline is in the national interest, but the last word on whether the project will go forward ultimately rests with the president.

Mr. Obama has delayed making that decision until all the legal and environmental reviews of the process are completed. He has said a critical factor in his decision will be whether the project contributes to climate change.

Last year, an 11-volume environmental impact review by the State Department concluded that oil extracted from the Canadian oil sands produced about 17 percent more carbon pollution than conventionally extracted oil.

But the review said the pipeline was unlikely to contribute to a significant increase in planet-warming greenhouse gases because the fuel would probably be extracted from the oil sands and sold with or without construction of the pipeline.

This month, environmentalists pointed to a letter from the Environmental Protection Agency that they said proved that the pipeline could add to greenhouse gases.

The question of whether to build the pipeline comes as Mr. Obama hopes to make climate change policy a cornerstone of his legacy. This summer, the E.P.A. is expected to issue sweeping regulations to cut greenhouse gas pollution from power plants, a move experts say would have vastly more impact on the nation’s carbon footprint than construction of the Keystone pipeline.

In December, world leaders hope to sign a global United Nations accord in Paris that would commit every nation in the world to enacting plans to reduce its rates of planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions. In the coming months, countries are expected to begin putting forward those policies for cutting carbon emissions.

While the Keystone pipeline is not expected to be part of the United States climate change plan, a public presidential decision on the project could be interpreted as a message about Mr. Obama’s symbolic commitment to the issue of climate change.

Until that decision is made, however, both sides of the Keystone fight are stepping up their tactics. Environmental groups are planning more marches and White House petitions, while Republicans in Congress are looking for ways to bring the Keystone measure back to Mr. Obama’s desk.

Senator John Hoeven, Republican of North Dakota, who sponsored the Keystone bill, said he would consider adding language requiring construction of the pipeline to other legislation, such as spending bills to fund federal agencies, which could make a veto far more politically risky for Mr. Obama.

A final decision by the president could come soon. Last month, a court in Nebraska reached a verdict in a case about the pipeline’s route through the state, clearing the way for construction. And this month, final reviews of the pipeline by eight federal agencies were completed.

However, Mr. Obama is under no legal obligation to make a final decision, and there is no official timetable for a decision. He could approve or deny the project at any time — or leave the decision to the next president.
 

A version of this article appears in print on February 25, 2015, on page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: Obama Vetoes Effort by Republicans to Force Approval of Keystone Pipeline.

Obama Vetoes Bill Pushing Pipeline Approval, NYT,
FEB. 24, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/25/us/politics/as-expected-obama-vetoes-keystone-xl-pipeline-bill.html

Obama Urges Global United Front

Against Extremist Groups Like ISIS

 

FEB. 18, 2015

The New York Times

By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS

WASHINGTON — President Obama called on Americans and more than 60 nations on Wednesday to join the fight against violent extremism, saying they had to counter the ideology of the Islamic State and other groups making increasingly sophisticated appeals to young people around the world.

On the second day of a three-day meeting that comes after a wave of terrorist attacks in Paris, Sydney, Copenhagen and Ottawa, Mr. Obama said undercutting the Sunni militant group’s message and blunting its dark appeal was a “generational challenge” that would require cooperation from mainstream Muslims as well as governments, communities, religious leaders and educators.

“We have to confront squarely and honestly the twisted ideologies that these terrorist groups use to incite people to violence,” Mr. Obama told an auditorium full of community activists, religious leaders and law enforcement officials — some of them skeptical about his message — gathered at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next door to the White House. “We need to find new ways to amplify the voices of peace and tolerance and inclusion, and we especially need to do it online.”

Key points in the terrorist group’s rapid growth and the slowing of its advance as it faces international airstrikes and local resistance.

But, Mr. Obama said, “we are not at war with Islam. We are at war with people who have perverted Islam.”

White House officials cast the conference as a rallying cry and progress report after Mr. Obama’s speech on terrorism to the United Nations General Assembly in September, and said it signaled Mr. Obama’s desire to play the leading role in assembling an international coalition to fight an ideological war against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. They said the battle was just as important as the military campaign Mr. Obama launched against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria last summer, which has shown mixed results.

Despite the president’s call to arms, many of the leaders and officials attending the conference expressed doubt about the ability of the Obama administration to counter extremist messages, particularly from the Islamic State, which has a reach and agility in social media that far outstrips that of the American government.

“We’re being outdone both in terms of content, quality and quantity, and in terms of amplification strategies,” said Sasha Havlicek of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London-based research organization, in a presentation at the meeting. She used a diagram of a small and large megaphone to illustrate the “monumental gap” between the Islamic State, which uses social media services like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, and other groups and governments, including the Obama administration.

“The problem is that governments are ill placed to lead in the battle of ideas,” Ms. Havlicek said as she called for private companies to become involved in what she called “the communications problem of our time.”

Administration officials acknowledged the problems they face. “You could hypothetically eliminate the entire ISIL safe haven, but still face a threat from the kind of propaganda they disseminate over social media,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser. “It’s an undervalued part of how you prevent terror attacks in the United States.”
Continue reading the main story

At the same time, human rights activists at the conference said they had grave concerns about domestic efforts to counter violent extremism, known inside the government by the acronym C.V.E. They said that programs to spot potential homegrown terrorists could morph into fearmongering closet surveillance efforts that trample on civil rights and privacy, and that the administration could also be giving tacit approval to foreign governments that abuse human rights in the name of countering terrorism.

A coalition of advocacy groups wrote to the White House on Tuesday raising their concerns, and some Muslim-American community groups boycotted the meeting.

“The government must behave in a way so that victims of hate crimes and violent extremism know that government agencies are there to protect their rights and safety, not just monitor their religious and political expression,” said Samer Khalaf, the president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. “This focus solely on attacks committed by Arabs or Muslims reinforces the stereotype of Arab- and Muslim-Americans as security threats, and thus perpetuates hate of the respected communities.”

American intelligence officials have long believed that the greatest terrorist threat in the United States is no longer from meticulously plotted events like the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that originate overseas, but from American citizens who become radicalized on their own or by a foreign terrorist organization.

In his remarks, Mr. Obama said that other countries had a responsibility to help.

“If we’re going to prevent people from being susceptible to the false promises of extremism, then the international community has to offer something better,” Mr. Obama said, adding that the United States would “do its part” by promoting economic growth and development, fighting corruption and encouraging other countries to devote more resources to education, including for girls and women.

“When governments oppress their people, deny human rights, stifle dissent or marginalize ethnic and religious groups, or favor certain religious groups over others, it sows the seeds of extremism and violence,” Mr. Obama said. “It makes those communities more vulnerable to recruitment.”

Part of the business of the conference on Wednesday was to bring together leaders from Minneapolis, Los Angeles and Boston, where federal pilot programs underway are aimed at helping target disaffected young people who might be susceptible to extremist messages.

The president said it was crucial that such efforts include input from Muslim-Americans, who he said have sometimes felt “unfairly targeted” by government antiterrorism efforts.

“We have to make sure that abuses stop, are not repeated, that we do not stigmatize entire communities,” Mr. Obama said. “Engagement with communities can’t be a cover for surveillance.”

Among the participants on Wednesday was Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, who said the attacks in her city had prompted her to ask herself, “What did we not do to prevent that?”

Hans Bonte, the mayor of Vilvoorde, Belgium, said that his town of 4,200 had been beset by Islamic State recruitment efforts and that 28 young people had gone to Iraq and Syria. He said another 40, including a number of under-age girls, were preparing to depart or “marked as potential leavers.”

“We are facing a global problem, but we have to act locally,” Mr. Bonte said, criticizing what he called some European countries’ “ostrich policy” of saying they do not have a problem.

One surprise participant in State Department sessions for the meeting on Wednesday was the head of Russia’s Federal Security Service, the post-Soviet K.G.B.

The State Department said it had been notified Tuesday night that Aleksandr V. Bortnikov would be attending the conference as part of an expanded Russian delegation. The visit would be unusual under the best of circumstances, but it comes at a moment of heightened tensions over the Kremlin’s support for separatists in eastern Ukraine and the role of Russian troops in the fighting there.

“Violent extremism and terrorism are problems that affect communities around the world, including Russia,” said Jen Psaki, the State Department spokeswoman.

The European Union has put Mr. Bortnikov on its sanctions list because of the Ukraine crisis, but he is not subject to American sanctions. On Thursday, Mr. Obama will address foreign leaders gathered at the State Department to talk about their countries’ programs.

Vitaly I. Churkin, Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, questioned the effectiveness of a United States-led global effort to counter terrorism, which he said would be counterproductive. “It’s only going to attract extremists,” he said Wednesday evening at an event at the Harvard Club in New York.
 

Michael R. Gordon contributed reporting from Washington, and Somini Sengupta from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on February 19, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Against Radicals, Obama Urges Global United Front.

Obama Urges Global United Front Against Extremist Groups Like ISIS, NYT,
FEB. 18, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/19/us/obama-to-outline-nonmilitary-plans-to-counter-groups-like-isis.html

Obama Immigration Policy

Halted by Federal Judge in Texas

 

FEB. 17, 2015

The New York Times

By JULIA PRESTON

A federal judge in Texas has ordered a halt, at least temporarily, to President Obama’s executive actions on immigration, siding with Texas and 25 other states that filed a lawsuit opposing the initiatives.

In an order filed on Monday, the judge, Andrew S. Hanen of Federal District Court in Brownsville, prohibited the Obama administration from carrying out programs the president announced in November that would offer protection from deportation and work permits to as many as five million undocumented immigrants. The first of those programs was scheduled to start receiving applications on Wednesday.

Judge Hanen, an outspoken critic of the administration on immigration policy, found that the states had satisfied the minimum legal requirements to bring their lawsuit. He said the Obama administration had failed to comply with basic administrative procedures for putting such a sweeping program into effect.

The administration argued that Mr. Obama was well within long-established federal authority for a president to decide how to enforce the immigration laws. But Texas and the other states said the executive measures were an egregious case of government by fiat that would impose huge new costs on their budgets.

In ordering the administration to suspend the programs while he makes a final decision on the case, Judge Hanen agreed with the states that the president’s policies had already been costly for them.

“The court finds that the government’s failure to secure the border has exacerbated illegal immigration into this country,” Judge Hanen wrote. “Further, the record supports the finding that this lack of enforcement, combined with the country’s high rate of illegal immigration, significantly drains the states’ resources.”

Ken Paxton, the attorney general of Texas, which is leading the states bringing the lawsuit, hailed the judge’s ruling as a “victory for the rule of law in America and a crucial first step in reining in President Obama’s lawlessness.” He said Mr. Obama’s actions were “an affront to everyone pursuing a life of freedom and opportunity in America the right way.”

Mr. Obama said he was using executive powers to focus enforcement agents on deporting serious criminals and those posing threats to national security. Three-year deportation deferrals and work permits were offered for undocumented immigrants who have not committed serious crimes, have been here at least five years and have children who are American citizens or legal residents.

As part of the package, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson also established new priorities, instructing enforcement agents to concentrate on deporting the most dangerous criminals, including terrorists and gang members, as well as migrants caught crossing the border illegally.

In his opinion, Judge Hanen accused administration officials of being “disingenuous” when they said the president’s initiatives did not significantly alter existing policies. He wrote that the programs were “a massive change in immigration practice” that would affect “the nation’s entire immigration scheme and the states who must bear the lion’s share of its consequences.” He said the executive actions had violated laws that the federal government must follow to issue new rules, and he determined “the states have clearly proven a likelihood of success on the merits.”

Since the lawsuit was filed on Dec. 3, the stark divisions over Mr. Obama’s sweeping actions have played out in filings in the case. Three senators and 65 House members, all Republicans, signed a legal brief opposing the president that was filed by the American Center for Law and Justice, a conservative legal action organization.

Joe Arpaio, the sheriff of Maricopa County in Arizona, who is known for crackdowns on people living in the country illegally, also filed a brief supporting the states’ lawsuit. In December, a federal judge in Washington dismissed a separate lawsuit by Sheriff Arpaio seeking to stop the president’s actions.

On the other side, Washington and 11 other states as well as the District of Columbia weighed in supporting Mr. Obama, arguing that they would benefit from the increased wages and taxes that would result if illegal immigrant workers came out of the underground. The mayors of 33 cities, including New York and Los Angeles, and the Conference of Mayors also supported Mr. Obama.

“The strong entrepreneurial spirit of immigrants to the United States has significantly boosted local economies and local labor markets,” the mayors wrote in their filing.

Some legal scholars said any order by Judge Hanen to halt the president’s actions would be quickly suspended by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans.

“Federal supremacy with respect to immigration matters makes the states a kind of interloper in disputes between the president and Congress,” said Laurence H. Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard. “They don’t have any right of their own.”

The states’ lawsuit quotes Mr. Obama as saying many times in recent years that he did not have authority to take actions as broad as those he ultimately took. Mr. Tribe said that argument was not likely to pass muster with appeals court judges.

“All of that is interesting political rhetoric,” he said, “but it has nothing to do with whether the states have standing and nothing to do with the law.”

Judge Hanen, who was appointed in 2002 by President George W. Bush, has excoriated the Obama administration’s immigration policies in several unusually outspoken rulings. The president's supporters have said that Texas officials, who are leading the states’ lawsuit, were venue shopping when they chose to file in Brownsville.

But at a hearing on Jan. 15, Judge Hanen said Brownsville, which sits on the border with Mexico, was an appropriate venue for the suit because its residents see the impact of immigration every day. “Talking to anyone in Brownsville about immigration is like talking to Noah about the flood,” Judge Hanen said.

In a lengthy and colorful opinion last August, Judge Hanen departed from the issue at hand to accuse the Obama administration of adopting a deportation policy that “endangers America” and was “an open invitation to the most dangerous criminals in society.”

The case involved a Salvadoran immigrant with a long criminal record whom Judge Hanen had earlier sent to prison for five years. Instead of deporting the man after he served his sentence, an immigration judge in Los Angeles ordered him released, a decision Judge Hanen found “incredible.” Citing no specific evidence, he surmised that the administration had adopted a broader policy of releasing such criminals.

While acknowledging that he had no jurisdiction to alter policy, Judge Hanen said he relied on his “firsthand, in-the-trenches knowledge of the border situation” and “at least a measurable level of common sense” to reach his conclusions about the case.

“The court has never been opposed to accommodating those who come to this country yearning to be free, but this current policy only restricts the freedom of those who deserve it most while giving complete freedom to criminals who deserve it least,” he wrote.

The mayor of Brownsville, Tony Martinez, was among those who filed court papers supporting Mr. Obama’s actions. “We see a tremendous value in families staying together and being together,” Mr. Martinez said on a conference call on Tuesday organized by the White House. “Eventually we hope to get all these folks out of the shadows,” he said.

Obama Immigration Policy Halted by Federal Judge in Texas, NYT,
FEB 17, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/18/us/obama-immigration-policy-halted-by-federal-judge-in-texas.html

Obama,

Trying to Add Context to Speech,

Faces Backlash Over ‘Crusades’

 

FEB. 6, 2015

The New York Times

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR

WASHINGTON — President Obama personally added a reference to the Crusades in his speech this week at the National Prayer Breakfast, aides said, hoping to add context and nuance to his condemnation of Islamic terrorists by noting that people also “committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.”

But by purposely drawing the fraught historical comparison on Thursday, Mr. Obama ignited a firestorm on television and social media about the validity of his observations and the roots of religious conflicts that raged more than 800 years ago.

On Twitter, amateur historians angrily accused Mr. Obama of refusing to acknowledge Muslim aggression that preceded the Crusades. Others criticized him for drawing simplistic analogies across centuries. Many suggested that the president was reaching for ways to excuse or minimize the recent atrocities committed by Islamic extremists.

“I’m not surprised, I guess,” said Thomas Asbridge, a medieval historian and director of the Center for the Study of Islam and the West at the University of London. “Any use of the word ‘Crusade’ has to be made with great caution. It is the most highly charged word you can use in the context of the Middle East.”

It was, Mr. Obama’s aides said, not entirely an accident. The president wanted to be provocative in his remarks, they said, urging people to see how the current brutality of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, fits in the broader sweep of a global history that has often given rise to what he called “a sinful tendency that can pervert and distort our faith.”

They described the president as eager to use the prayer breakfast to make people think about the need to stand up against those who try to use faith to justify violence, no matter what religion they practice.

Still, White House officials said the president did not expect to start a full-throated, daylong debate about the Crusades. And they expressed surprise that a single sentence in the speech had generated such an outcry.

“What he wanted to do is take on perversions of religions that are out there,” a senior White House adviser said, requesting anonymity to discuss the president’s speechwriting process. “He wanted to make the point that this isn’t the first time we’ve seen faith perverted and it won’t be the last.”

The first and loudest response to Mr. Obama’s remarks came from partisans, who accused the president of offending millions of Christians with an ill-considered comparison of the Islamic terrorist threat to the territorial attacks in Europe in the 11th century.

Michelle Malkin, a conservative columnist, said on Twitter that “ISIS chops off heads, incinerates hostages, kills gays, enslaves girls. Obama: Blame the Crusades.”

But the conversation quickly moved beyond the usual suspects. Many of the commentators on Friday came to the defense of the Crusades, arguing that the brutal sweeps through Europe were a reaction to previous Muslim advances.

Mr. Asbridge, who has written a series of histories of the period, said that view of the Crusades is held by relatively few historians. Most believe, he said, that the Christian Crusades were attempts to reclaim sacred territories, rather than reaction to Muslim actions more than 450 years earlier.

“I don’t necessarily have a problem with President Obama attempting to remind people that there is a history of violence by Christians,” he said. “But we have to be very careful about judging behavior in medieval times by current standards.”

Deborah E. Lipstadt, a professor of modern Jewish history at Emory University, said the president’s remarks seemed to be an attempt to avoid alienating Muslims by blaming their religion for groups like ISIS.

She said the remarks at the prayer breakfast will rightly bolster critics who insist that Mr. Obama should simply say that the United States is at war with Islam.

“He has bent over backwards to try to separate this from Islam,” Ms. Lipstadt said. “Sometimes people try to keep an open mind. And when you have too open a mind, your brains can fall out.”

In Mr. Obama’s remarks at the breakfast, he also managed to anger people in India, just days after being hosted by the country’s leaders during a three-day trip to New Delhi. In the speech, Mr. Obama called India “an incredible, beautiful country,” but he added that it is “a place where, in past years, religious faiths of all types have, on occasion, been targeted by other peoples of faith, simply due to their heritage and their beliefs — acts of intolerance that would have shocked Gandhiji.”

Indian news channels ran Mr. Obama’s remarks as top news for most of the day Friday, prompting senior ministers to issue public remarks in response. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley responded by saying that India “has a huge cultural history of tolerance. Any aberration doesn’t alter the history.”

Eric Schultz, the deputy White House press secretary, said Friday that he had no response to critics of Mr. Obama’s speech, but he described the president’s remarks as in keeping with his “belief in American exceptionalism,” which stems in part from “holding ourselves up to our own values.”

“So the president believes that when we fall short of that, we need to be honest with ourselves and look inward and hold ourselves accountable,” Mr. Schultz said. “What I think the president was trying to say is, over the course of human history, there are times where extremists pervert their own religion to justify violence.”

Julie Hirschfeld Davis contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on February 7, 2015, on page A11 of the New York edition with the headline: Obama, Trying to Add Context to Speech, Faces Backlash Over ‘Crusades’.

Obama, Trying to Add Context to Speech, Faces Backlash Over ‘Crusades’,
FEB 6, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/07/us/obama-trying-to-add-context-to-speech-faces-backlash-over-crusades.html

President Obama’s New Budget

 

FEB. 2, 2015

The Opinion Pages

The new York Times

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

President Obama’s fiscal 2016 budget, released on Monday, pulls together the themes and policies set forth in his State of the Union address and other recent speeches and gives them a force and coherence — an ambitiousness — that a more piecemeal delivery does not convey.

As a practical matter, the budget details what Mr. Obama believes needs to be done to help ensure a more prosperous and inclusive future for ordinary Americans, including greater contributions from corporate America and from those atop the wealth ladder. Politically, it seeks to frame the terms of the debate for the 2016 presidential election season. If Republicans simply reject those terms — if they can’t discuss the ideas and act on them — they may find themselves, deservedly, struggling for a response.

The core of the president’s 2016 budget is a plan to boost the middle class by helping low- and middle-income earners pay for education, child care, job training and other needs, and by vastly expanding investment in the nation’s infrastructure. These initiatives would be paid for, in the main, by nearly $1 trillion in tax increases that would fall on the wealthy and large financial institutions over the next decade.

The new taxes, however, are also carefully crafted to spur economic growth more broadly. A proposed higher rate on capital gains, for example, would discourage rampant and inefficient tax sheltering, while encouraging investors to deploy the capital in ways that are more economically productive. Ditto the financial tax that is structured to discourage speculative activities at banks that endanger the economy, as well as taxpayers.

The President Obama’s budget also presents a reasonable plan for relieving the near-term damage from automatic budget cuts, also known as sequestration. Much like a bipartisan plan that reduced the harm of sequestration in 2014 and 2015, the proposed budget would raise nonmilitary discretionary spending over the capped level by $37 billion while offering a dollar-for-dollar increase in military spending.

Even with those increases, discretionary spending would fall by 2019 to its lowest level on record as a share of the economy, in data going back to 1962 — too low to meet the needs of a large economy and a growing population. Still, easing the sequester as Mr. Obama proposes would help shift the national discussion to how, when and how much government should spend, rather than how much it should retreat and retrench from its duties.

Contrary to the Republican charge that the budget is fiscally irresponsible, it addresses, albeit indirectly, longer-term problems like the financing shortfall in Social Security — just not in ways that Republicans care to acknowledge. For example, the budget assumes passage of comprehensive immigration reform, which would boost the economy by adding millions of newly legalized workers. Immigration and economic growth are essential to improving the financial health of the Social Security system.

The president’s budget will not be enacted in whole, and perhaps not even in part. But enactment is not the only measure of its success. The budget is a strong discussion draft, detailed in its particulars, unassailable in its aims and a powerful challenge to the Republicans.
 

A version of this editorial appears in print on February 3, 2015, on page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: President Obama’s New Budget.

President Obama’s New Budget,
FEB 2, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/03/opinion/president-obamas-new-budget.html

In State of the Union,

Obama Sets an Ambitious Agenda

 

JAN. 20, 2015

The New York Times

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR

and JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS

WASHINGTON — President Obama claimed credit on Tuesday for an improving economy and defiantly told his Republican adversaries in Congress to “turn the page” by supporting an expensive domestic agenda aimed at improving the fortunes of the middle class.

Released from the political constraints of a sagging economy, overseas wars and elections, Mr. Obama declared in his sixth State of the Union address that “the shadow of crisis has passed,” and he vowed to use his final two years in office fighting for programs that had taken a back seat.

He called on Congress to make community college free for most students, enhance tax credits for education and child care, and impose new taxes and fees on high-income earners and large financial institutions.

Among the Republican senators in the House chamber before the State of the Union address on Tuesday, from left in middle row, were Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, Ted Cruz of Texas, James Lankford of Oklahoma and David Perdue of Georgia.

“We have risen from recession freer to write our own future than any other nation on Earth,” Mr. Obama said in an hourlong address to a joint session of Congress seen by an estimated 30 million people. “Will we accept an economy where only a few of us do spectacularly well? Or will we commit ourselves to an economy that generates rising incomes and chances for everyone who makes the effort?”

Confident and at times cocky, the president used the pageantry of the prime-time speech for a defense of an activist federal government. He vowed to continue a foreign policy that combines “military power with strong diplomacy,” and he called on Congress to lift the trade embargo on Cuba and pass legislation authorizing the fight against the Islamic State.

He said approval of a resolution granting him that power — something he has long argued he does not need to carry out the five-month-old campaign — would send an important signal. “Tonight, I call on this Congress to show the world that we are united in this mission,” Mr. Obama said. “We need that authority.”

“This effort will take time,” he said of the battle to defeat the Islamic State, the Sunni militant group that is also known as ISIS or ISIL. “It will require focus. But we will succeed.”

Mr. Obama met a skeptical but respectful Congress hours after vowing to veto Republican legislation that would restrict abortion and speed the approval of natural gas pipelines, the latest in a series of veto threats that reflect his eagerness to confront conservative ideology.

The president discussed the military campaign against the Islamic State, and the larger battle against violent extremism, during his State of the Union address.

The president made no mention of the major losses that his party endured in congressional elections last fall, choosing to ignore the assertion by Republicans that voters had rejected his vision. In the speech, he promised that any attempt to roll back his health care law, an overhaul of regulations on Wall Street or his executive actions on immigration would also face vetoes.

Mr. Obama implied that the Republican economic agenda lacked an ambition equal to his own. At one point, he mocked the party’s unshakable determination to force approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry 830,000 barrels of petroleum per day from Canada to the Gulf Coast. “Let’s set our sights higher than a single oil pipeline,” he chided.

Speaker John A. Boehner, behind the president, and a sea of Republican lawmakers facing him in the House chamber sat impassively as Democrats stood to applaud Mr. Obama’s recitation of the brightening domestic picture during his presidency. The improvements include job growth, falling deficits and the slowing of the growth of health care costs.

“This is good news, people,” Mr. Obama interjected at one such moment, looking out at the motionless Republicans.

The president sought to cement an economic legacy that seemed improbable early in his first term, when the country was in near-economic collapse. The speech aimed to live beyond his presidency by helping to starkly define the differences between Democrats and Republicans ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

“The verdict is clear,” Mr. Obama said. “Middle-class economics works. Expanding opportunity works. And these policies will continue to work, as long as politics don’t get in the way.”

The president discussed tax increases on high-income earners and large financial institutions that would fund new initiatives during his State of the Union address.

Mr. Obama did highlight some potential areas of collaboration with Republicans. He called on Congress to approve a business tax overhaul, the granting of authority to strike trade deals, and a major initiative to repair crumbling roads and bridges.

But the president vowed to push forward with policies that have generated Republican opposition. He called for aggressive action to fight climate change and said he would not back down on changes to the nation’s immigration system. He repeated his support for new regulations on Internet providers and for overriding state laws that limit competition for high-speed service.

In the official Republican response, Senator Joni Ernst, the freshman Republican from Iowa, said, “Americans have been hurting, but when we demanded solutions, too often Washington responded with the same stale mind-set that led to failed policies like Obamacare.”

Hitting back at his political opponents and critics, Mr. Obama dismissed as “cynics” those who rejected the lofty vision he campaigned on, even as he said he recognized the criticism of his decade-old claim that there is not a “black America or a white America, but a United States of America.” He urged members of both parties to reach for a better politics, “one where we spend less time drowning in dark money for ads that pull us into the gutter.”

He called on his adversaries to “appeal to each other’s basic decency instead of our basest fears,” and he said he longed for a political reality free of “gotcha moments or trivial gaffes or fake controversies.” He said a better politics would allow Republicans and Democrats to come together on reforming the criminal justice system in the wake of killings by police officers in Ferguson, Mo., and on Staten Island.

Mr. Obama’s plans — which would offer free community college for millions of students, paid leave for workers and more generous government assistance for education, child care and retirement savings for the middle class — are to be financed in large part by $320 billion in tax increases over the next decade on higher income earners as well as a fee on large financial institutions.

The tax plan would raise the top capital gains tax rate to 28 percent, from 23.8 percent. It would also remove what amounts to a tax break for wealthy people who can afford to hold on to their investments until death. Mr. Obama also said he wanted to assess a new fee on the largest financial institutions — those with assets of $50 billion or more — based on the amount of risk they took on.

Those proposals would pay for the community college initiative, which would cost $60 billion over a decade, as well as an array of new tax credits intended for the middle class. They include a new $500 credit for families with two working spouses; a subsidy of up to $2,500 annually to pay for college; and the tripling, up to $3,000, of an existing tax break to pay for college.

“It’s time we stop treating child care as a side issue, or as a women’s issue,” Mr. Obama said, “and treat it like the national economic priority that it is for all of us.”

Mr. Obama said that the approach of walling off the United States from Cuba had been ineffective, and that it was time to try a new strategy. Seated in the first lady’s box overlooking the House chamber, Alan P. Gross, the American prisoner freed in December as part of the new détente, repeatedly mouthed “thank you” when Mr. Obama recognized him.

The president argued that the United States had an opportunity to strike a deal with Iran to prevent its development of a nuclear weapon, and he made it clear that he opposed legislation — backed by some Democrats and Republicans — to impose new sanctions before those talks had played out.

“We lead best when we combine military power with strong diplomacy, when we leverage our power with coalition building, when we don’t let our fears blind us to the opportunities that this new century presents,” Mr. Obama said.

And after several high-profile cyberattacks, including one against Sony Pictures that his administration blamed on North Korea, Mr. Obama called for legislation to bolster protections against such computer-enabled assaults.

“No foreign nation, no hacker should be able to shut down our networks, steal our trade secrets or invade the privacy of American families, especially our kids,” the president said. “If we don’t act, we’ll leave our nation and our economy vulnerable. If we do, we can continue to protect the technologies that have unleashed untold opportunities for people around the globe.”

Correction: January 21, 2015

An earlier version of this article misstated the nature of a killing by a police officer on Staten Island. The victim, Eric Garner, was choked to death, he was not shot.

A version of this article appears in print on January 21, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Obama Defiantly Sets an Ambitious Agenda.

In State of the Union, Obama Sets an Ambitious Agenda,
NYT,
JAN 20, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/21/us/state-of-the-union-obama-ambitious-agenda-to-help-middle-class.html

Obama Will Seek

to Raise Taxes on Wealthy

to Finance Cuts for Middle Class

 

JAN. 17, 2015

The New York Times

By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS

WASHINGTON — President Obama will use his State of the Union address to call on Congress to raise taxes and fees on the wealthiest taxpayers and the largest financial firms to finance an array of tax cuts for the middle class, pressing to reshape the tax code to help working families, administration officials said on Saturday.

The proposal faces long odds in the Republican-controlled Congress, led by lawmakers who have long opposed raising taxes and who argue that doing so would hamper economic growth at a time the country cannot afford it. And it was quickly dismissed by leading Republicans as a nonstarter.

But the decision to present the plan during Tuesday’s speech marks the start of a debate over taxes and the economy that will shape both Mr. Obama’s legacy and the 2016 presidential campaign.

It is also the latest indication that the president, untethered from political constraints after Democratic losses in the midterm elections, is moving aggressively to set the terms of that discussion, even as he pushes audacious moves in other areas, like immigration and relations with Cuba.

The president’s plan would raise $320 billion over the next decade, while adding new provisions cutting taxes by $175 billion over the same period. The revenue generated would also cover an initiative Mr. Obama announced this month, offering some students two years of tuition-free community college, which the White House has said would cost $60 billion over 10 years.

The centerpiece of the plan, described by administration officials on the condition of anonymity ahead of the president’s speech, would eliminate what Mr. Obama’s advisers call the “trust-fund loophole,” a provision governing inherited assets that shields hundreds of billions of dollars from taxation each year. The plan would also increase the top capital-gains tax rate, to 28 percent from 23.8 percent, for couples with incomes above $500,000 annually.

Those changes and a new fee on banks with assets over $50 billion would be used to finance a set of tax breaks for middle-income earners, including a $500 credit for families in which both spouses work; increased child care and education credits; and incentives to save for retirement.

The initiative signals a turnabout for Mr. Obama, who has spoken repeatedly about the potential for a deal with Republicans on business tax reform but little about individual taxation, an area fraught with disagreements.

“Slapping American small businesses, savers and investors with more tax hikes only negates the benefits of the tax policies that have been successful in helping to expand the economy, promote savings and create jobs,” said Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah and chairman of the Finance Committee. “The president needs to stop listening to his liberal allies who want to raise taxes at all costs and start working with Congress to fix our broken tax code.”

The proposal includes some elements that have previously drawn support from both Republicans and Democrats, including education and retirement savings proposals and the secondary earner credit. A tax on large banks was part of a plan proposed last year by former Representative Dave Camp, a Republican from Michigan who retired as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.

Mr. Obama’s advisers characterized the plan as the next phase in the president’s economic message, which he has been promoting over the past two weeks with trips highlighting the nation’s financial rebound. During the tour, Mr. Obama has pitched a range of initiatives to help the middle class, including free community college and paid leave. The bulk of the financing for the plan — $210 billion — would come from a capital-gains tax hike and a change in the way the tax code treats the appreciated value of inherited assets. Under the proposal, inherited assets would be taxed according to their value when they were purchased. That means the capital gains on those assets during a person’s lifetime, now shielded from taxation, would be subject to tax at the time of the bequest.

The proposal, which does not apply to charitable gifts, would fall almost entirely on the top 1 percent of taxpayers, administration officials said. It would apply to capital gains of $200,000 or more per couple, with an additional $500,000 exemption for personal residences.

The remaining $110 billion to pay for Mr. Obama’s new tax proposals would be generated by a fee imposed on the largest and most highly leveraged financial firms. That proposal, administration officials said, was designed to make “risky activity” more costly for the roughly 100 such companies in the nation with assets more than $50 billion. Those companies would be assessed a fee based on the amount of debt they hold.

White House officials estimated that the new $500 “second-earner” tax credit would benefit 24 million households. The maximum credit would go to those earning up to $120,000, and some credit would be available to those earning up to $210,000.

Mr. Obama also wants to triple the child care tax credit, now an average of $550, and make it easier for middle-income earners to qualify, offering up to $3,000 for each child under age 5. White House officials said the plan would eliminate existing tax-advantaged flexible spending accounts for child care and reinvest those resources in the tax credit.

In addition, the president is proposing to streamline a jumble of educational tax credits and give students up to $2,500 annually toward earning a college degree. Students who attend school less than half the time would also qualify for the first time, and more of the credit, $1,500, would be available regardless of whether an individual owed any taxes.

The president’s proposal would also increase access to tax-advantaged retirement savings plans by requiring most employers that do not offer such plans to automatically enroll their workers in an IRA. Mr. Obama has failed to find common ground with Republicans on fiscal matters, including during several attempts to strike a “grand bargain” on the budget. The Treasury Department proposed a detailed corporate tax overhaul in 2012 that would have lowered the rate to 28 percent from 35 percent and given multinational corporations a one-time “tax holiday” to return billions of dollars in profits parked overseas. But it went nowhere in the last Congress.

It is not clear that this effort will fare any better.

 

A version of this article appears in print on January 18, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Obama Will Seek to Reduce Taxes on Middle Class.

Obama Will Seek to Raise Taxes on Wealthy to Finance Cuts for Middle Class,
NYT, JAN. 17, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/18/us/
president-obama-will-seek-to-reduce-taxes-for-middle-class.html